Socialism

Leftism necessarily goes ever lefter. But what is “lefter”? Leftism has no essence, it is just a coalition to knock over the apple cart in order to grab some of the apples, so “lefter” is whatever direction looks like some apples could be knocked loose. “Lefter” could be almost anything, head off in almost any direction, depending on fashion, opportunity, and perceived vulnerability of people who have stuff.

Leftism necessarily goes ever lefter, because having knocked over one apple cart, there is now an apple shortage, and people then need to knock over another, and because of the broken window effect – when leftism works, in the sense that apples were rolling around, they go looking for something else to knock over, since that apple cart is already smashed up. Leftists perceive wealth as a snapshot in time, as if it were a gift from God. The ways that wealth is created are meaningless to them, it is a pie to be sliced up and enjoyed.

Right now “lefter” is heading off towards ethnic cleansing of whites and desexing of males. Many leftists find this alarming, being white or male or both, so are trying to find some other direction, any other direction – and socialism is some other direction.

Socialism is not currently a threat, being so thoroughly and totally discredited:

But what Democrats hope to do is run on a program of Ferguson and Krystalnacht, and then, instead of delivering Ferguson and Kristallnacht, deliver socialism. “Instead of burning down the supermarkets in Ferguson, leave them standing and we democrats, being such nice caring people, will order them to give you free stuff. So much nicer. Please don’t burn my house down, kill me, and rape my children.” Might work, but the dynamics of leftism are likely to get away from them. Venezuela promised socialism, wound up delivering socialism plus Kristallnacht.

People keep telling me that socialism works great – the statistics always improve enormously under socialism. Thus, for example, Venezuela has cured inflation and put everyone on a pension, and given everyone a university education, and provided universal healthcare. UN statistics always show socialist countries doing wonderfully well on the Human Development Index.

Of course they cured inflation by setting official prices, and you cannot actually buy anything worth buying at official prices, and universal healthcare gets you a bed to die in. Universal healthcare provides abundant caring, but a distinct shortage of health, and universal university education produces ignorance instead of knowledge.

In a thread on my blog, a supposed reactionary has been telling me how socialist agriculture worked great in Russia long ago and far away, and they had to do it because the climate being harsh, they had to have collective agriculture because it works so much better. And, similarly, lots of leftists will tell you how great socialism has been for Cuba and Venezuela – though the internet makes this story a bit more difficult to get away with than when they tell it about far away places and long ago times.

234 Responses to “Socialism”

The left’s psychology is characterized by infantilism- the need to satisfy the Freudian id monster with immediate gratification- reaching and grasping and putting objects in mouth. They are babies, it’s that ding dong simple.

Jim you’ve still got a tiny brain worm lurking in there, and I probably have it too, no matter how hard I try to flush it away.
That worm is the American Revolution: muh natural rights, muh private property. We may have moved on from ‘taxation is theft, privatise the oceans’ but we still see ourselves as wise men of economics, and (worse) we see history through an economic – in fact a MACRO-economic – lens.

You played the comparisons card so here’s one: would you rather live in Berlin 1988 or Berlin 2018?
Sweden or Norway 2018?

Now consider the next red pill: what do Cuba, Venezuela, the USSR and pre-boom China have in common? Sanctions from the International Community. Exceptions: Iran and South Africa. Differences between Cuba/Venezuela and Iran/South Africa? In large part ethnic.

What’s really wrong with the British NHS? The man in the street would say ‘funding’ but we in these circles know that’s wrong: funding more than doubled since the 1990s and standards worsened. Is it all down to race? No, the USSR was mostly not a matter of race (laying aside the usual issue, which might as well be considered a universal blight).
What’s really wrong with the NHS is the myriad checks and balances, the weakness, the lack of leadership. Every decision passes through regulators, external auditors, unions, corporate governance associations, parliamentary committees, commissioners and all manner legal crittery.

Is it so obvious that a fascist NHS, with military clarity, singularity of purpose, total absence of questioning/appeals procedures, brutal penalties for those abusing their positions, etc. etc. would be a clunking ‘socialist’ behemoth with the heating turned to max in the middle of summer, fans everywhere and the windows open while old ladies lie immobile in bed with a glass of water just out of reach?

I don’t honestly think it is so obvious.

Libertarian economics correctly identifies the yearning for equality as a cancer, and socialist régimes have certainly had their fair share of that particular sin.
What libertarian economics woefully gets wrong however is the idea that the aristocracy is ALSO a cancer: let the bourgeoisie alone and we shall rule you with Smith’s invisible hand, mass production for the benefit of the masses. Yeah except when the masses act like morons (as Pareto’s Law says half of them always will), the bourgeoisie loses money if it stops them!!!

That’s the job of the aristocracy: to keep the plebs AND the bougie cosmopolitan ‘makers’ in their place, well-behaved and deferential to higher values.

Will Bernie Sanders Jeremy Corbyn economic socialism improve anything? Some things: the crony-capitalist ‘out-sourcing’ scam wouldn’t be missed. But for the most part no: more envy, more checks&balances, more downward deference is only going to make matters worse.

But so will unbridled laissez-faire capitalism. The Utopia of the international financial élites: a casino with 24-hour drinking and a brothel (sorry a factory of cam girls) out the back, catering to every ‘market demographic’ on Earth, everywhere on Earth.

You make a lot of really great points here. I would like to briefly elaborate.

I think it is clear that capitalism, for all intents and purposes, is just as much of a failure as communism has been. What are communism and capitalism but two sides of the same coin? Communism produced military dictators, insanely powerful bureaucracies, and crushing poverty, while capitalism produced television “culture”, insanely powerful bureaucracies, and morbid obesity.

Sure, communism is less enjoyable to live in: there’s material poverty and nothing ever happens. But at least the schools are great, people can plan for the future, and perversities do not become industries of immense profit. In capitalism, the schools are profit-maximizing diploma mills, the government’s time horizon in years can be counted on one hand, divorce-rape is one of the most vibrant areas of the economy, fast food is endemic, the commoners and their daughters are corn-fed fat, art is dead, music is dead, science is awarded to the most industrious granteers, costs of living are insanely high, and so on and so forth every enumerable distortion of man’s natural state ultimately stemming from the easily comprehensible fact that capitalism strives inexorably to smash every natural human relationship and take its place, the inevitable end game every relationship mediated by capital.

Unrestrained global capitalism has produced supermarket aisles overflowing with bread, sure, but at what cost?

Industry and technology was created by the heroic CEO scientist engineer, as depicted by Ayn Rand, mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor, to create technology, to create value by technology, and to make that value and technology widely available.

That is the historical reality – that this form of organization is what made our civilization capable of what it has achieved.

It is just not true that in communism people can plan for the future. The central planners plan their future. That is what communism is.

It is not capitalism that has destroyed marriage. It is not capitalism that destroyed music and art. Have communist countries produced music and art?

>Industry and technology was created by the heroic CEO scientist engineer, as depicted by Ayn Rand, mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor, to create technology, to create value by technology, and to make that value and technology widely available.

Alternatively, industry and technology was created by scientifically minded heretics — nondenominational, nonconformist Protestants drawn from a mix of clergy, high commons, and minor nobility —, aided and abetted by the Crown in its struggle against its ever-intransigent major nobility, in the omnipresent High-Low vs. Middle fashion.

Alternatively, there was “capital” long before there was “capitalism”.

Alternatively, there is a tremendous difference between nonindustrial modes of capitalism, such as merchantry, piracy, colonial conquest, and the East India Company, and industrial modes of capitalism, such as the textile manufacturers of the early-mid-19th-century Dickensian urban waste, Standard Oil, IBM, and Apple. Is it intellectually honest to point to Rafflesian piratical merchant warlordism as a justification for the unrivaled hegemony of Boeing or Lockheed-Martin? I daresay this question answers itself.

>It is just not true that in communism people can plan for the future. The central planners plan their future. That is what communism is.

Not so. In communism, people do plan for their future. Their future is assuredly gray and very boring, because in communism there is no upward mobility, a condition not unlike the interminable nonvicissitudes of peasantdom, the difference of course being that this order is imposed by humans rather than nature.

>Have communist countries produced music and art?

Notice that classical music survived as a living form in the Soviet Union long after it was dead and buried in every AngloNapoleonic order.

> Alternatively, industry and technology was created by scientifically minded heretics — nondenominational, nonconformist Protestants drawn from a mix of clergy, high commons, and minor nobility

We frequently see the same person before the restoration competing to gain control of power and wealth by having a Christianity more pure than the other guy’s Christianity, then after the restoration competing to gain power and wealth by mobilizing other people’s capital and other people’s labor to create value.

Industry and technology was created in large part by people chucked out of the theocracy and forced to earn a living, and in this sense was indeed created in substantial part by heretics.

> There is a tremendous difference between nonindustrial modes of capitalism, such as merchantry, piracy, colonial conquest, and the East India Company, and industrial modes of capitalism.

The Industrial modes of capitalism, and the scientific and engineering modes of capitalism, show up at the same time as the East India company. Ayn Rand’s hero scientist engineer CEO appears in history (having been kicked out of the theocracy) at the same time as the East India Company launches to engage in piracy and banditry.

And the engineer CEO proceeds to advance technology well before the East India company settles down from mobile banditry to stationary banditry.

Just to be clear, I’m with Jim on Throne, Altar and Freehold.
We do indeed need large parts of the economy to be unplanned.

However, we also need large parts of the economy to be planned.

“It is not capitalism that has destroyed marriage. It is not capitalism that destroyed music and art.”

I have to push back, sorry. Capitalism pushed gay ‘marriage’, customisable wedding ceremonies, secular wedding venues and so on. Capitalism benefits from the union and subsequent dissolution, from the consumer choices of families and then from the consumer choices of individuals once more.
There is no market incentive that favours the traditional society: that’s the job of the church. Absent the church, capitalism gains power, so it comes as no surprise that capitalism (whether dominated by Jews or not) is hostile to Christianity where Christianity’s dominant.
One really only needs to look at Christmas and Easter to see where capitalism’s allegiance lies.

As for art and music, it’s complex. Certainly the laissez-faire world of Germany between 1780 and 1880 produced great chamber music for domestic consumption, but to an extent this was enabled by a strong afterglow of the patron system. Indeed pretty quickly it became impossible as a model and the patron system re-emerged in the form of lavish state bureaucracies. We went from self-publishing Chopin and Schumann to state employee Mahler very quickly as it became apparent that for every Liszt who turned a smart buck, there’d have to be a few Schuberts scratching around in poverty and squalor.
What hope is there for a Charles Ives, keeping his papers in his desk while he works as an insurance salesman? Basically state institutions found the papers and staged performances, but he certainly never could.

“Have communist countries produced music and art?”

The Soviet Union wasn’t bad compared to 20th century America, but it certainly wasn’t as vibrant as 20th century France and England. Hungary was good throughout, partly through a strong sense of nationalism.

It’s important to note however that I’m certainly not defending envy-based socialism: only the idea that things can be done collectively by the state at all.

It doesn’t mean everything should be done collectively and/or by the state, and it doesn’t mean anything should be based on envy or equality.

But the idea that more or less everything ought to ideally be done privately in a ‘neo-cameralist SovCorp’ (Moldbug) or in a ‘Throne, Altar and Freehold’ society (Jim) needs more thought. Carlyle was as sceptical of economics per se and laissez-faire applied to labour as he was about equality and enfranchisement, and Carlyle’s always right in the end.

Some things just ain’t about GDP. GDP’s great when everyone’s selling their family heirlooms to buy whiskey, and history will note that our period’s GDP has done just fine with people being unable to afford to rent and hence blowing what they *can* afford on Franky&Benny’s and trips to Turkey.
Capitalism’s intensely relaxed about all of that and wildly enthusiastic about globohomo Poz.

Blaming capitalism for the destruction of marriage is transparently absurd.

It was Christians and the Christian holiness spiral that destroyed marriage. Romance was invented when the Church pushed mandatory female consent to marriage. Then the Puritans denounced marriage as a pagan accretion on Christianity. And the more hostile you are to marriage and the family, the holier you are – Dalrock has an interesting collection of example sermons.

Capitalism produced “McLintock”, “I love Lucy”, and “Father knows best”, shows that unambiguously endorse and promote marriage and family values. It was the nineteenth century evangelicals who wanted to “rescue fallen women” who proceeded to replace marriage with child support.

Since the eleventh century, Christianity has been attacking marriage, and capitalism has been promoting it, with a respite from 1660 to 1820 when the King put his foot down on the Church and forced it to reluctantly endure men and women committing to each other to form families . The eleventh century attack on marriage profoundly weakened and damaged it, and the nineteenth century attack (“child support, think of the children”) pretty much killed it. If marriage did OK from 1933 to 1963, you have to credit capitalism for defending marriage against attack by holier than thou Christians.

Since the mid nineteenth century the battering ram for smashing marriage and breaking up families has been child support – and it sure is not capitalists who are promoting child support in place of family.

Without any doubt this is absolutely true. The NRx central thesis, that progressivism and Progressivism are peas in a pod, along with the Moldbug account of the memetic evolution of the whole shebang, is absolutely true.

What I’m saying here is a little more nuanced than “capitalism destroyed marriage”. What I’m saying is only that capitalism didn’t defend marriage. When marriage was dominant, the (still WASPy) media was more than happy to cater to that preference, but believe me, when big business smelt the profit that was to come from gay marriage, it wanted it.

There’s a reason Santander push ‘pride month’ when you use their ATMs, and it’s not that the board of directors are all Democrats.

The way to defend marriage isn’t to try to win the culture wars by making quality shows portraying healthy families and hope people get it. The way to defend marriage is to pass draconian laws that make fornication and adultery jailable offences, offer irresistible financial incentives for family formation, withdrawn upon divorce, and promote traditional family status in the hierarchy of society, bluntly refusing to allow any divorcee or degenerate to hold public office.

> but believe me, when big business smelt the profit that was to come from gay marriage, it wanted it.

Bullshit. Gays are not getting married, except to humiliate Christians and publicly desecrate marriage. When they do get married, they don’t spend significant amounts of money on it, and everyone knew this would how it would turn out in practice.

The advent of gay marriage meant that any two consenting adults could sign this secular contract in a secular venue of their choice according to the selection of options they wanted.

Heterosexual couples now refer to each other as ‘my partner’. THAT’s the achievement of gay marriage: the destruction of the sacred institution of marriage and its replacement with ritual consumption.

A friend of mine just married his live-in lover of twenty plus years. He blew £300 on a pair of shoes: him, not her. Within days of blowing ooooh £20,000 at least on the big party, they were off on shopping trips to far-away malls.

Globohomo owns these people. The cuckoldry of working all week only to hand it over to people who hate you is just as bad as the cuckoldry of blessing your daughter’s pairing with a far-away savage.

Capitalism replaces societies of loyalty (spiritual) with societies of temporary financial advantage (material). Everything a man owns he constantly evaluates selling, no matter if it had been his family’s inheritance for generations. From land and transferable goods to reputation, local traditions, social technology. That has been the trajectory since the merchants began to gain status over the aristocracy (sumptuary repeals, corn law repeals), and ultimately since the aristocracy ceased to be considered ignoble for paying scutage instead of riding to battle.

Capitalism is a contract killer, happy to supply any demand, no matter how base. It insists on numerically evaluating everything, it must break down everything into comprehensible parts, treat any whole or community as an accidental collection of atoms, and count “nature” as an invention of cowardly philosophers to prevent it from maximizing profit, and as an enemy to conquer. It accelerates entropy with arbitrage and mass mixture of individuals from country to city to city. It’s a fundamentally female attitude – always looking to sell out and get a better deal.

Marriage is only one more natural society of loyalty in its way, which it will put a price tag on dividing and reconstructing. Families require a stability which capitalism attacks for all the reasons said. A family works for 100s of years to build a reputation which is lost in a moment when the heir moves to the city where his value is only his wallet and that is quickly lost.

As you yourself point out, marriage is price controls and rationing because the short-sighted market is destructive, and needs correction from above. But that is a capitalist description, which treats chaotic individualism as the natural state which we need to calculate ourselves out of, instead of marriage which is the natural state given by God.

Also, everything in the West is “Christian” in the NRx idiom, capitalism included. McLintock was only a temporarily less universalist Christianity. Its priests were more universalist so it never had a chance.

Your criticism of the female consent deviation is worthwhile. I only wish my Latin were better, to read the sources with. But it’s my impression courtly love, troubadour romances, etc. were universally attacked by the clergy as long as they were around.

We need more than one word for capitalism. Mercantilism seems like a better word for your capitalism. I don’t understand it well enough but I think it has the same spiritual failings to a lesser degree.

Everything the welfare state has done to destroy the family, including child benefit, results in more households, more debt, more misery, more spending on junk, bigger government as the supposed solution, and down we go.

For the financiers it’s a virtuous circle, for humanity it’s the opposite.

These guys always have both sides covered. I see Vox today saying nationalism versus globalism is the only distinction that matters. Folk here are saying its socialism versus capitalism.

All wrong I’m afraid. It’s much more simple.
Good v evil. God v satan.
The Book of Revelation tells us most everyone will fall for it, in fact, even the elect would fall for it were Jesus not to return to save them.

Hence I keep banging my drum. All the minutiae don’t matter at all, unless you have a rule book and some faith.

>Blaming capitalism for the destruction of marriage is transparently absurd.

Come on Jim, the boyz needed to over-turn all of Christianity’s rules, and create physical and spiritual misery, it’s the way they maximise their profits, although it’s not really profit they want, it’s material things, land, people and gold.

I mentioned below, Lord Mishcon, a Labour peer, a (((lawyer))), pioneered decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, and his law firm was behind Gina Miller’s legal challenge to Brexit, and is a paragon of globalist border and tax evasion. They’re all the same: create despair to turn a profit, of course marriage was one of their first targets, likewise blasphemy laws, usury laws.

What some Jew did in Brexit is entirely unrelated to the question of who destroyed marriage.

What is relevant is who was it behind the push to replace marriage with child support, which push started in the nineteenth century, and what is being preached by the Churches from the Christian pulpit today.

It was the usual suspects behind the push to replace marriage with child support (and to introduce easy divorce, and civil partnerships and gay marriage). Mishcon pushed to legalise sodomy, you think that was good for marriage? He was a leftist peer, of course he loved child support and the destruction of patriarchy.

Can’t you see how big business benefits every step of the way into the abyss? The fact they love Brexit is just one aspect of it, take a few minutes to browse their ‘about us’ page. Their corporate video includes the phrase ‘there is no higher authority’. Incredible. They don’t even attempt to hide it.

I’m sorry if you can’t see the drivers of the constant drift left (away from God, same thing), because it’s as clear as day that the evil ones lead us astray and then milk the resulting troubles, applies to marriage, to wars, to debt, to vaccines, to the size of the state. They are always there pushing it and increasing their wealth.

And yet to come, biggest theft in history, as numerous major fiat currencies collapse, whilst golf shoots to the moon (all part of their plan instigated in 1922 at Genoa). They want it all.

No big business does not benefit. What I see is big businessmen being terrorized by women that they are forced to hire, terrorized by enormous power given to a handful of state approved accountants by Sarbannes Oxley, terrorized by Human Resources.

You are blaming the kulaks for the famine.

Blaming big business for this stuff is like blaming whitish shopkeepers for the empty shelves and smashed up shops in Venezuela.

The truth is that nominally Christian whites did plenty to attack and destroy marriage before the Jews got in on the job. Business interests did not do that. Rootless cosmopolitans did not do that. Our predecessors did that, and now we have to clean up the mess.

Lying about it, whether to others or to ourselves, is not going to do any good. We need to be honest with ourselves. We share part of the blame. Getting rid of Jews is good, but it is not sufficient. Crushing the parts of the Church that engaging in holiness spirals is even more necessary.

Any church that attacks masculine authority by attacking earthly fathers will eventually attack the Heavenly Father. Any attack on proper manly authority and behavior is heresy, whatever form it takes.

Post-war leftism has apparently been fantastic for big business. No surprise when you factor in the increase in the workforce/debt/spending caused by feminism etc. 2+2 =4.

This is apparently your blind spot, despite everyone knowing about pork-barrel politics and now we literally see big business promoting leftism memes openly, such as feminism and diversity. They know it increases misery and hence consumption.

We’re at the point now where the influence of the leftist agenda pushed by the financiers is starting to unravel, and will lead to collapse. They don’t care, as they have the reset button ready, will profit hugely in the transition (as they have real assets now, not paper debts) and the next system will be up and running in a jiffy.

I make the right wing argument, then. They are my enemy and oppose me and my people. If I am stronger, I will fuck them up and take what is theirs. While I am weaker, I will undermine them and make them weak in turn.

In the end, a fair few are going to get beat up and their lunch money taken. The ones that sign on with us get to keep their stuff and take part of the lunch money for themselves. That is the only justification needed.

It would be a better question to ask if capitalism was created by whiggery and does it have whiggery as a necessary precondition. If yes, producing better music and art than more radical forms of whiggery is obviously not the correct angle to look at. If not, and I really damn hope not, then we have a very weird research task to do. In current_year it is obviously difficult to untangle the effects of capitalism from the gazillion kinds of government interventions that influenced it. Those interventions are driven by whiggery, more radical than in the past albeit not as radical as communist whiggery. But many libertarians manage to have a good guess how capitalism would look without that. The weird research task is this: untangle capitalism even from the forms of whiggery that existed in the 19th century. And those forms weren’t even necessarily government interventions.

For example, Victorian Britain is often used as an example of fairly pure capitalism. But it was already in that age of do-goodery you wrote about. If it affected the military, surely it affected the business. So that is a taint by whiggery. And Gladstone. Can one untangle capitalism from Gladstone’s whiggery?

I have a certain liking for Chesterbellocian Distributism, quote: “The problem with capitalism is too few capitalists, not too many.”

John Medaille wrote once that Doug MacArthur was a Distributist and he created modern Taiwan based on those princiiples. Took land from the nobles and gave it to the peasants in family farm sizes, and paid the nobles with scrips that could be used to buy ownership in the new industrial firms, thus the nobles were interested in using their education and political pull to make those new industrial firms succeed and if they did, they got richer than the used to be as landowners, not poorer. Sounds like a win-win.

Except that a business whose capital consists of entirely worthless paper goes nowhere. Someone had to supply actual machines and whatnot to those businesses or a currency that can be used to import them, like USD. I suspect that someone was the American taxpayer. So I guess it proves that Distributism is really nice if you happen to have a Fairy Godmother.

Eh. I didn’t say it works. But if and when it does, it is pretty nice.

“In current_year it is obviously difficult to untangle the effects of capitalism from the gazillion kinds of government interventions that influenced it.”

I like that notation, gonna have to pinch that 😀

Yes indeed: an anti-capitalist on the left can always come up with a ‘just so story’ as to why it was all greedy capitalist pigs, and a libertarian can always come up with a ‘just so story’ as to why it was all government toxic incentives.

The thing is, when it comes to the corruption of the socio-cultural domain, it’s far easier than when it’s something as abstract as ‘the’ economy.

Chicken or egg: did government impose gay marriage on a population that went along with it kicking and screaming, or did private companies push tolerance and diversity for decades before the government finally granted full equality under the law, to the cheers of the private sector?

I don’t think it’s even debatable: The Cathedral was pushing queer liberation all along, even while being openly queer was strictly speaking illegal. The record companies, newspaper publishers, fashion designers etc. etc. were all on board long before the government started to soften its traditional stance.

Am I letting government off the hook? No of course not: in other domains government led the way. The Cathedral isn’t structured in such a way that nipping the ‘early’ stage of the process in the bud would put everything right! If it was, we wouldn’t need the concept of The Cathedral in the first place: it’d just be ‘the universities’ or ‘the teachers’ or ‘the government’ or ‘the lobbyists’.

No, the whole thing’s rotten and self-reinforcing. The machine’s well and truly off the rails and needs to be taken down root and branch (sorry mixed metaphoritis).

The only drum I’m banging in this particular context is that the old libertarian prejudice that NOTHING WHATSOEVER shall be run collectively by the state, owned by the state and delivered by the state, under pain of hellfire, is just that: a stupid prejudice.

In point of fact, a good strong leader of the sort Jim favours (George III) or of the sort I’d prefer (Charles The Hammer) has no qualms at all about state monopolies owning running and delivering goods and services. That kind of leader has no qualms regulating and laying down the law, busting chops or busting jaws.

We need Ron Paul about as much as we need Bernie bloody Sanders. They’re both egalitarian crackpots.

The markets are amoral (not immoral, an important distinction). They’ll produce degeneracy for degenerate nations and virtue for virtuous nations. Markets serve one function, and one function only — to reduce scarcity. Thus they are merely the reflection of the people — if they are rotten, the people are rotten. It is for those in charge of society to make sure that people create demand for prayerbooks, and not porn.

Are you claiming markets are culture-neutral? Well, first of all, look into the history of the concept of doux commerce.

Second, I think a use value – exchange value distinction is valid, even though it may sound kinda Marxian. When I develop business software, features that sell the product at sales demos for managers (charts! charts everywhere!) and features that make users productive and happy (let them prepare the data in Excel and copy-paste into the software) are entirely different. When my father renovated a house for resale he did it differently than when he did it for us.

To some extent, optimizing for exchange value, which follows from capitalism, results in optimizing for bullshit, cheap shiny things, bells and whistles, not serious use value.

On the other hand, I support capitalism because this annoying feature is vastly outdone by the immense productivity increase created by the division of labor, which is precisely what reduces scarcity. Also, automatization. That is my daily job, so take it from me: division of labor is a precondition for automatization. I cannot really replace an artisan with a machine. I can replace a man whose only job in a nail manufacture is cut two inch long pieces from a steel rod. This also immensely increases productivity.

So. Markets are not culture neutral. They tend towards emphasizing exchange value, which means bells and whistles, not real utility. But the damage done by this is vastly outdone by the scarcity reduction they facilitate. You just have to be a bit careful about what you buy.

But that is not some inherent property of the markets, but of human nature. People like shine, bling, kitsch, sensationalism, voyeurism, bad news & outrage porn, … markets merely reflect that preferences.

>which means bells and whistles

Hah, that much was lamented even by Mises who complained that there is too much shitty people about, which brings about the predominance of shitty products in the marketplace. Though he mostly complained about what he perceived as degenerate cultural products like detective novel, jazz music, and fugly architecture (that’s what an Old World gentleman thought about contemporary American culture… good thing he did not live to witness the rise of porno industry). Mises’ political beliefs precluded him from advocating censorship, but censorship shouldn’t be a problem for reactionaries, no? Shape culture in such a way to have markets consistently be a force of good.

>You just have to be a bit careful about what you buy.

Yeah. I work in automation engineering, but people always think I am some weird luddite for refusing to use social media or buy and use “gadgets” i.e. the useless electronic crap or when I complain that there’s too much electronics stuffed everywhere (who the heck uses smart toilets anyway?!).

Not people in general value bling, but people who are not experts of a given field. The shoemaker has more comfortable, drier, and overally more pleasant shoes that you have. But it may not look too shiny.

The point is that the market makes you care about what other people value. If you DIY yourself a house, you don’t care what others value.

I mean, the opposite of the market is not socialism but DIY. Which means low division of labor which means poverty. But man, that house my father renovated for us, not for resale, that was a really good job.

Essentially it is all about high division of labor vs. low division of labor, which means a trade-off between bling and poverty. Since poverty sucks far more than bling, obviously the trade-off should be very much in favor of division of labor, specialization and if it must be, bling. We just need to be aware that this trade-off exists.

Hence my endorsement of Manchesterism: Modern type corporate capitalism preceded Gladstone by two hundred years: Modern type corporate capitalism started in 1660, when we first saw Ayn Rand’s CEO engineer, advancing technology and using other people’s capital and other people’s labor to make it widely available.

Clear separation of roles between management and ownership, trading ownership stakes for cash in an open market. Or maybe Wall Street is a metonym for politically connected bankers whose political role is pretending the politics is just business.

It’s widely recognized that the most dynamic companies, by far, are the ones whose founders are still at the helm. What of significance has Microsoft done since Bill Gates was dethroned? How about Apple, since the childless, homosexual Foxconn whisperer assumed command? Why, when malaise of scale seems to affect nearly every corporate entity of any significance, is the Great Waltonian Behemoth still a ruthless, vampiric machine of observably high competence? All of the healthiest, longest-lived, most innovative companies are owned and operated by the founder’s patrilineal descendants. The nü-male contingent at YCombinator have a standing policy of unquestioningly backing the founder in time of crisis. I question the societal utility of public companies, as taking a company public seems to be the move stockholders make in order to cash out, i.e. get rich and take their genius elsewhere, i.e. foist an empty shell of past greatness onto the public and let them treat it as an “investment vehicle”, i.e. a speculative retirement gamble, i.e. let Our Father Thou Art In Washington debase the currency in the process of propping up massive bubbles of Boomer-held stocks long enough to complete the biggest, hugest, most astoundingly enormous wealth transfer in the entire history of the world to the hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and retirement home proprietors on their blessed way out of this mortal coil.

I fail to see a single product or service provided by Wall Street that in $CURRENT_YEAR A.D. cannot be done with a blockchain and a smartphone app, which is a nuclear armageddon fire raid siren indicating the existence of political fuckery. Do you disagree?

The weird research task is this: untangle capitalism even from the forms of whiggery that existed in the 19th century. And those forms weren’t even necessarily government interventions.

This would be real science, with caveats:
– This “capitalism” needs to be defined (at least provisionally).
– Preferably whiggery should be defined too — though not necessary, since there’s no point to not “untangle” the phenomenon from everything else that is a part of its external parameters.
– The researchers have to remember that scientific laws (by definition in Zinovyev’s logic-based instrumentalism approach, just to have something well-defined) apply to all and any spherical horses in vacuum absolutely, and that no actual living horse can possibly be spherical or exist in vacuum.

Capitalism is ancient. The word “Capital” means head as in count of cattle. Abraham was a capitalist – had cattle and wage laborers. The Old Testament has stuff regulating the treatment of wage laborers and contractors.

Modern capitalism is corporate capitalism, which was founded by Charles the Second in 1660. Corporations had long existed, but Charles the Second made using them for pursuit of profit high status and socially acceptable, whereupon they suddenly became immensely popular among wealthy people seeking investments, and entrepreneurs seeking other people’s capital.

After 1660, we suddenly see profit oriented corporations all over the place, most famously or infamously the piratical East India Company, which is the very archetype of modern capitalism, but we also see Rand’s bold engineer CEO advancing technology and making it widely available, after the fashion of Silicon Valley.

This ‘capitalism’ thing is poison though. The problem is proponents will be free&loose with their definitions: sometimes capitalism is Abraham having a family business, then other times capitalism is open borders and deregulated labour – the virtues of sweatshops, etc. etc.

Let’s be totally clear here: the family business, whether small or not, should not be attacked needlessly or on sinful grounds such as envy or resentment.

The unbridled provision of any goods&services that can attract willing patrons is a different matter. We’ve tried it and it’s produced a lot of misery, stupidity and ultimately leftism.

Similarly treating labour as a commodity: “go out there, get on your bike and find employment”. We’ve tried it and what happens is that the workers want a social security safety net that steadily takes on all manner of services on the model of the state as eleemosynary institution.
They also see how their bosses get a seat at the decision-making table and they want that too, so it brings us mass franchise democracy.

The status of creating and owning a business should not be questioned, although the nature of the goods & services produced is up for grabs in quite a ‘command and control’ way.
The status of ‘I have the right to sell online bingo and you cannot stop me’ is basically garbage at this point: we need to ditch it entirely, the whole ‘rights’ nonsense.

If your poster boy for the evil product of capitalism is alcohol, you don’t have a case.

If your poster girl for the evil product of capitalism is whorehouses, you still don’t have a case, since any boarding house where women board without male supervision has pretty similar problems.

Gambling and usury, yes, you have a case.

Zippy’s definition of usury allows you to issue a mortgage, and to buy a house on a mortgage, but forbids an outstanding balance attracting interest on credit cards. Seems reasonable.

But having restrictions on usury and gambling is not a general restriction against capitalism, or a general case against capitalism. They are two rather narrow special cases of taking advantage of other people’s weakness.

I don’t know this zippy but forbidding the consequences of debt-fuelled consumption is envy-socialism not solidarity collectivism.

It’s not just alcohol: chocolate fountains are as bad as alcohol, albeit less frequently. Pizza and french fries are as bad as alcohol.
Again this isn’t about virtue, it’s about security. Penniless plebs getting fat and singing the birthday song as they rot childless and brainless in a corporate cubicle is not good for society: not because it’s ‘fun’ (debatable in any case) but because it’s the death of our people.

Whorehouses are rather like alcohol: in a stable, peaceful, lawful society tolerating them is a luxury we can easily afford.
In Clownworld, the future of sex is cam girls getting tipped by alienated incels and handing over part of their takings to their allocated ((entrepreneur)).

“having restrictions on usury and gambling is not a general restriction against capitalism, or a general case against capitalism. They are two rather narrow special cases of taking advantage of other people’s weakness.”

The more I relax my “business good, government bad” muscle, the more things make sense. Liberals talk about asymmetry of information and they do so in order to score points for equality and social justice.
Their motives don’t make their substance invalid: whenever you invite a tradesman into your home, you’re in effect writing a blank cheque. If you hire him to fit a new boiler and he tells you new boilers aren’t compatible with your central heating configuration, you either let him rip it all out and fit new, or you have no hot water.

Imagine the world of George III where the guilds are protected from foreign competition but the quid pro quo is that they serve the health of the nation at the pleasure of the King. When imagining that world, remove all the libertarian shibboleths (pointless red tape, regulatory bloat, crazy agendas) and see it clearly: the King charters a guild of apprentice, journeyman, expert and master builders and they take pride in their craft.

>Huge government bureaucracies: blame capitalism!
>Everyone has to get a degree because simple aptitude tests are illegal because racist, and physical production and construction illegal because sinful unto Gaia: yup, classic capitalism
>Governments make insane, self-destructive decisions that benefit nobody: the plutocrats are at it again!
>Wives permitted and heavily incentivised to ruin men’s lives at a whim: I bet the bankers did this

The colleges became the preeminent capitalist form. This has not gone unnoticed by others. Harvard has been likened to a hedge fund with a university attached (1)(2), and the HPYS axis is a highway to Wall Street (3).

The biggest catastrophe is recent memory is the so-called Great Recession, in which Wall Street blackmailed Congress for a trillion dollars and the Federal Reserve for much more.

It isn’t a perfect analogy because the issue is deliberately obfuscated in many ways, but the divorce-rape industry is sort of like if capitalism invaded the legal system in order to seize everything a man has ever saved in his life and give it to a woman to spend it on shoes and vacations and cars.

The proposition that Harvard is a form of capitalism is ludicrous. Power and wealth associated with Harvard is won by superior holiness, not by creating value and exchanging it for other value, and it has been that way since it was founded. It has always been a theological college and the headquarters of the state religion.

Power and wealth associated with Harvard from the perspective of prospective future alumni may be won by superior holiness, but power and wealth associated with Harvard with respect to its world-class patronage network and ludicrous endowment are won by gold-plated reputation and immense influence subtle and explicit. It remains a seminary institution, though its pursuits are now wholly worldly. Certainly, it is one of world-history’s very best examples of a corporate entity bending state function to its own ends.

I’ll give you two recent examples of capitalism driving the decay of society.

1. The plastic bag charge

In the United Kingdom, we now have a plastic bag charge for supermarket bags. This was ostensibly to save the environment by reducing the incentive to just throw the things on the floor.

There’s a grain of truth to this but here’s the reality:

The supermarkets lobbied the government for the bag charge on the grounds that they couldn’t do it alone because the others would out-compete them on price, so everyone had to do it for the sake of the planet.
The Tory government was highly sceptical: our base hates new taxes and our enemies will point out that this new tax disproportionately affects poor people. We’ll be doomed if we do it. Can’t you just give the proceeds to charity?
The supermarkets pretended they were fine with that: tax, charity, makes no difference to us, and we’ll gladly administer the charitable part for free, because we love the environment and we love charity too!
So the tax was introduced and the proceeds passed to charities. The government was secretly laughing because, knowing how the world works, they knew that ‘charities’ could easily just turn out to be projects funded by the local councils, which makes it easier for them to pretend to be making savings thanks to the new money coming in: definitely not tax revenue, just mandatory charitable donations!

Here’s the red pill: the supermarkets were laughing too, because people wouldn’t be able to use their shopping bags as bin bags any more – they’d have to jolly well buy their bin bags like they should’ve been doing all along, the cheapskates!

The joke was on them however, because the plastic bag manufacturers knew the strength of the bags would have to increase, and while thicker plastic’s easier and cheaper to produce at the thin/film end, with pretty-thick plastic like that used in bags, it’s cheaper beyond a certain point to use as little as you can get away with.

Paradigm case of everyone motivated by money to pretend to be doing good when in fact they were not only doing no good at all (no reduction in plastic use, no genuine charity going on) but they were in fact doing evil (laws in effect mandating the purchase of bin bags and outlawing the reuse of free ones!!!!!!!!!).

2) The tobacco screen

Tobacco must be hidden behind steel shutters in the UK because if a child ever catches sight of a (plain) packet of cigarettes, they’ll be immune to the (now photographic) ads for the NHS (what?! think about it lol) but they’ll be instantly addicted to nicotine.
Yeah right. So what was it really all about?

The supermarkets assumed that under-cutting corner shops (“Mom and Pop” shops) would destroy them, and they tried that for half a century or more. It didn’t work: people will pay a premium for convenience some of the time, and wholesalers often have leftovers that they like to offload on smaller outlets and are more than happy to take the same margin as they do with larger outlets.

So the supermarkets went to government and pretended to care about lung cancer. The law was passed and it was mandated that tobacco products must be safely hidden from view by (expensive) screens.

Now every corner shop has either closed its doors completely or else been bought out by groups like ‘One Stop’ which is owned by, you guessed it, Tesco lol

Now ok you can legitimately complain that under anarcho-capitalism, neither of these things would have been possible, and that this type of governmental over-reach is a symptom of a sick democracy, and you’d be right.

The problem is, what’s to stop the same companies making the same arguments just as successfully to Hans Hoppie’s covenant community associations and being just as successful at having them pretend to believe them?

> I’ll give you two recent examples of capitalism driving the decay of society.

> 1. The plastic bag charge

Nuts.

It aint capitalism that throws capitalists in jail for giving customers plastic straws. And it aint capitalism that advertises a state monopoly use-our-service-or-we-kill-you while forbidding advertising for stuff people want and are willing to pay good money for.

Jim, the state monopolies are just big business gouging even more out of humanity than would be possible in a free market set-up. They love state monopolies, it’s the model for the post-socialist collapse that lies ahead. Drugs companies sell billions in drugs to the state, which takes on billions in debt to pay for it. And Tex Arcane revealed that big business puts stuff in floor cleaning fluid to ensure that cancers and other diseases are incubated in human babies, ensuring future profits. Nothing is too evil for these guys.

The perfect merger of state and big business has always been their agenda. They are nearly there, but it’ll look nationalist and sexy and right wing. It won’t be. Same old same old.

Glosoli with the greatest respect, you’re begging the question of nationalism, Jeff Tucker style.
If the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were able to nip degeneracy in the bud while closing the borders, there’s no reason whatsoever why a 21st century Nazbol/Phalangist dictatorship can’t do the same _and then some_

Nope, government has been captured by big business for centuries. They drive policy. They pay the pols to throw them prison contracts. They bribe the judges. They import the drugs to keep the prisons full.

Next thing you’ll be blaming voters for filling the prisons cos they voted for the government.

Do you deny the military-industrial complex exists? Do you deny it lobbies and directs spending? Which always rises. And wars, which always happen. Was it Cheney or Rumsfeld that ran Haliburton? You think his capitalistic ambitions didn’t help cause the Iraqi mess? It’s obvious big business is the horse, govt is just the cart.

> government has been captured by big business for centuries. They drive policy.

In the great minority mortgage meltdown, bankers were forced to make million dollar loans to no-hablo-english cat-eating illegals with no income, no job, and no assets. Bankers that failed to do so had their banks taken from them in favor of bankers more agreeable. Eventually every bank was ruined. The most criminal and compliant were bailed out, most lost everything.

You are blaming the kulaks for the famine. Blaming big business is like Trotsky claiming that kulaks were starving Russians and restricting Trotsky’s freedom of speech.

Affirmative action poster poster boy Angelo Mozilo temporarily benefited, but in the end, even he was blamed for doing what he had been helicoptered up out of obscurity to do: hand out white goodies to the race replacement voter block.

Angelo Mozilo drove policy in that he bribed the regulators to unload his bad loans on other big business. But the fact that he had bad loans to unload represents an attack on big business. That he was a banker at all represents an attack on bank shareholders and on anglo and Jewish bankers.

Just as they helicopter muggers and rapists into leafy green suburbs, they helicopter people like Angolo Mozilo into big business boardrooms.

>Angelo Mozilo drove policy in that he bribed the regulators to unload his bad loans on other big business.

Let’s be precise here – Angelo Mozilo and GS were likely true believers in the cause of having white Americans pay for their replacements and were happy to make money in the short term off the prospect.

The market doesn’t stop that sort of thing from happening – what the market is supposed to do is enforce an end to that by bankrupting the firms who act that way – as it would have if they weren’t bailed out.

The main problem is that with maturity transformation and a fiat currency every bank will inevitably need a bailout when whatever they’re all holding for collateral dips in price forcing a sale which further depresses the price which takes down the next least solvent bank which forces a sale which, etc.

Ultimately any energy in the banking sector not used promoting progressivism is energy wasted from the firm’s perspective.

> > Angelo Mozilo drove policy in that he bribed the regulators to unload his bad loans on other big business.

> Let’s be precise here – Angelo Mozilo and GS were likely true believers in the cause of having white Americans pay for their replacements and were happy to make money in the short term off the prospect.

True, but Angelo Mozilo would have been serving burgers and fries if the progressive state had not installed him in the boardroom and then handed him half a dozen of other people’s banks on a silver platter.

Ground zero of the Great Minority Mortgage Meltdown was not clever people at Goldman and Sach creating overly complicated financial derivatives of Mozilo’s dud loans. It was Mozilo committing the dumb ass financial fraud and dumb ass affirmative action in your face fraud required to obfuscate the fact that very few of the race replacement voter block are competent to handle a mortgage.

I think it’s pretty clear that the progressive state was trying to fuck Wall Street and Wall Street was trying to fuck the progressive state.

I think it’s equally clear that both won and both lost in various respects. The progressive state managed to exact some limited penance, and Wall Street managed to fuck Congress, the metaphorical incarnation of the American taxpayer, for a trillion dollars and change.

What we don’t generally see is the shady shit that goes on behind the scenes, but occasionally we catch faint glimpses. Take, for instance, the “totally fake”, “never issued”, “conspiracy theorist” bearer bonds officially debunked by NYT in 2009, or the impressive pedigree of Donald Trump’s Priebus-hitman Anthony Scaramucci. Scaramucci, by the way, is the only man I’ve ever seen one Christopher Cuomo truly respect.

Mozilo was never more than a pawn maneuvered by forces beyond his comprehension.

> Wall Street managed to fuck Congress, the metaphorical incarnation of the American taxpayer, for a trillion dollars and change.

Bullshit. Wall Street, under various forms of pressure, pissed away money trying to move the race replacement voter block into green leafy suburbs, and then part of the money that they pissed away was restored to them in a bailout. Some race hustlers made a lot of money in this process, but overall, far more of the one percenters got burned.

From 2005 November to the bailout, an enormous amount of rich people’s wealth was frozen in “illiquid” mortgage derivative securities, “backed” by dud mortgages. During this period, they were not at all happy, and they really had to be bailed out, or else the entire affirmative action scam would have met open revolt.

From 2005 November to the bailout, we had a Venezuelan style gap between the supposed market value of mortgage backed securities and credit default swaps, and their actual market value and this gap was rich people and Wall Street being screwed over just as much as looted shops in Venezuela and Ferguson are whiter people being screwed over.

The guys who drive the world realised that communism doesn’t work long ago, leftism needs careful control. Fascism is a much better leftist set-up for them. Obama was too commie, a step too far left, so they’ve moved things back towards the fascist model with Trump.

They always get what they want, it’s just a matter of time for them.

As for the 2008 credit crunch and the bankers, all of the losses were socialised, the big boyz got away with it, and are currently getting away with it once again. soon, the Fed will be printing and buying the S&P500 to keep things afloat, there will never be any nominal deflation, instead hyper-inflation will be engineered.

>Eventually every bank was ruined. The most criminal and compliant were bailed out, most lost everything.

You make my point for me. The big boyz were bailed out, whilst the smaller banks went under. Cui Bono? The Boyz! Who did they thank with million dollar speaking deals? Their puppets, the pols!

You don’t think the big boyz want there to be lots of competition from small players do you? That’s not how capitalism works. Those who want to won the whole world always seek to destroy competition, by hook or by crook (Tesla would confirm this).

Nothing new under the sun, and I continue to be amazed that you don’t see it, as it’s right in front of our eyes.

It does seem that ALL right-wing Americans have a blind spot for Trump, Jim included.

They know Reagan was a puppet of the financiers, they know Trump is knees-deep with the same guys and the most pro-Israel President since forever, but somehow they think the orange one is the real deal.

And even as he delivers the fracking and the pipeline to his paymasters, still cognitive dissonance is all I hear.

Trump is fake.
It’s too late now for the West, especially England and America, the invasion has happened, all that remains is the war.

Trump and his handlers know the currencies are going to collapse, and so pensions, and so the welfare state. They are already deliberately stoking the flames of race wars by faking the terrorist attacks like Manchester.

Trump is their guy. Next up, Rees-Mogg, a Catholic, you almost couldn’t make it up could you.

The emphasis is on ‘coming together’. Any model of The Cathedral / Globohomo Gayplex / Zog / etc. that doesn’t include ALL the components is going to fail, whether it’s Chomsky recognising advertising, government, media and capitalism but ignoring academia, or whether it’s Moldbug recognising academia, bureaucracy, politics, media and state religion but ignoring capitalism.

None of them are sufficient and arguably not all of them are necessary all of the time, but the fact is capitalism *will not* resist Zog and will often embrace it, whether under coercion *or not*.

The relevance of this to this article is that socialism per se (that’s to say the state running and owning a business) is not the problem here.

They’re *not* essential though, that’s the drum I’ve been banging here. I’m not coming after Jim because of a deep ideological disagreement: I’m bringing this up and not dropping it because it matters and if anywhere is open to the truth it’s this place.

Liberalism has been a mistake from day one.

Capitalism (in the sense of all voluntary trade without state interference being of at the very least mutual benefit to all involved, and, generally speaking, of large-scale benefit to society) is a half truth, at best.

We did fine at producing works of art, cathedrals and fine goods of civilisation way before capitalism, so it cannot possibly be a necessary condition for prosperity and civilisation.

What it boils down to is an American prejudice, with roots in England and elsewhere, namely: nobody gets to lord it over me – I have a natural right to my body and any property legitimately obtained through homesteading, trade, inheritance, gift, etc. etc.

Nope, you really don’t. What you have is a secondary property right bestowed on you by the Crown as a luxury of having a secure, peaceful and lawful society, and as a means to provide predictability and stability as a policy tool and as a policy goal.

Liberals of the classical variety mistook that for a natural right, and the consequence of that is Walter Block’s privately owned oceans. The other consequence is the death of European monarchy and with it the church, and with it Europe.

I’m sorry to be so harsh on capitalism: I still harbour those same prejudices myself, but reality is reality is reality, and reality here is that capitalism has produced mass obesity, self-centred narcissism, atomisation, the commodification of everything and a culture of debt and short-termism.
Is government, media, etc. woefully guilty of facilitating this? Absolutely, hence The Cathedral.

Is business the innocent bystander reluctantly dragged along for the ride, and hence harmless in a more just libertarian (or related) order?

To answer your final question: The more the covenant community is like a universal-suffrage democracy, the more it will suffer from Moldbuggian “red giant state” bureaucratic overreach, and will be open to petty zero-sum corruption as you describe. Conversely, the more the community is like a NeoCameralist hyper-monarchy with perfect cohesion, the more we can expect it to act for the long term benefit of the whole, which will involve some libertarianism, and some authoritarianism, as called for by the particular situation at hand. Allowing bright and ambitious Randian entrepreneurs to create value using other people’s capital and labor will definitely be part of the policy followed by such a state, because it just works so well.

A good state lets good people get along with good things (capitalism), prevents bad people from doing bad things, and prevents itself from doing bad things (overreach, socialism). Figuring out how a state can do all 3 reliably is a large part of the Reaction. Laying a fundamental problem like overreach at the feet of “capitalism” is just a non-starter. The King can’t tell the Lord how to rule his own lands, and the Lord can’t tell the private patriarch how to run his own family, because otherwise you get bureaucracy, entropy, you know the story. Nevertheless, if the Lord is causing sufficiently troublesome externalities, the King may intervene. Similarly, the King can’t tell the tycoon how to run his own factory, but that doesn’t mean the King has to stand meekly by while the tycoon pumps the capital’s waterways full of a thick, pungent industrial sludge, etc.

What’s needed isn’t less government, but good government. If capitalists are buying favours from the government, then that means that government is for sale, i.e. is not good government. That’s your problem. Banning or restricting capitalism is definitely not going to help fix this problem. If the capitalists are no longer in charge of the means of production, then the corrupt state is. They will find ways to be corrupt without the temptation of plutocrat gold.

Jim’s Throne, Altar and Freehold model can be seen, I believe, as an engineering refinement of the Moldbuggian thesis, designed to work with real people and societies rather than homo politicaleconomius — Jim doesn’t appear to think MM’s crypto-locked sovereignty would be sufficient (it would be interesting if he would elaborate on this some time).

“Allowing bright and ambitious Randian entrepreneurs to create value using other people’s capital and labor will definitely be part of the policy followed by such a state, because it just works so well.”

Dagny Taggart cuckqueans Mrs Rearden with the bracelet and then proceeds to commit adultery with Hank in the coal miner guy’s house with his blessing before he abandons his community and wrecks the local environment.

She then swiftly dumps Rearden in a hypergamous swapsy as soon as John Galt turns up and he claims her, fully aware of what she’d already done to the Reardens, as his due reward for being like awesome and saying awesome things and getting people to be awesome and betray their communities.

Then he shuts down the government, does a little bit of a messianic holiness s&%! test, gives a holy speech then backs away once again to put his bottom line first in a foreign country!!!

You couldn’t make it up.

Aunty Ayn was fiercely anti-racist, feminist in the ways that matter to feminists (though they’d spit feathers if you said that in front of them) and amoral in her atomised individualism.

As soon as her guys got anywhere near the gears of power, Greenspan became the most uber-‘statist’ central bank interferer and distorter of muh free market the world had seen to that point, and while he’s now gone back to his ‘metal money’ nonsense, he still hasn’t apologised.
Branden on the other hand pushed ‘self esteem’ as the solution to problems, and while he does go on about embracing reality and facing the consequences of past problematic behaviour, at its root it remains a very ‘me me me’ model of society and the mind.

These are not our guys, sorry to break it to yous.

When Lauren Rumpler and Cathy Reisenwitz claim to be the heirs of Rand, they’re not wrong: polyamory, sanctimonious demagoguery and legalisation of drugs YAY freeeeeeedom!!!

>Dagny Taggart cuckqueans Mrs Rearden with the bracelet and then proceeds to commit adultery with Hank in the coal miner guy’s house with his blessing before he abandons his community and wrecks the local environment.

Rectification of names – that’s not what adultery is – Dagny was unmarried.

The rest is pretty spot on but the problem is that Ayn Rand was great at describing the problems of socialism but had no understanding of how a healthy society could function and her instincts were awful because she was a feminist Jew and was totally blind to what type of government is needed for a market to function.

Hank was married but not gonna nitpick the point. I’m in agreement with everything you say here. Rand’s VERY Jewish.

Rand’s idea of what was wrong with socialism was really no good, but better arguments against the planned economy (including but by no means limited to Hayek and Mises) are also no good. Why?

Because you and I would rather live in Berlin 1988 then Berlin 2018, and all our greatest capitalist heroes (Ron Paul, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, etc. etc.) would improve Berlin 1988 by improving material prosperity, for sure, but would absolutely take part in the road to Berlin 2018, gleefully and ideologically.

Indeed much of the progress in economic prosperity would come FROM the path to Berlin 2018, whether it’s the off-shoring of heavy industry (Bob Murphy says it’s silly to care: you have a trade deficit with the grocery store, right?) or the importation of cheap labour (Peter Schiff says America’ll collapse if the nannies go away!).

The Randian/Paulian/TomWoodsians take us to Berlin 2018. It’s not even debatable.

I recommend for all us realists going back and listening to the Tom Woods show on The Poverty Cure, in which Michael Matheson Miller and Tom discuss how Africa could easily turn into Singapore if only microfinance replaced government-government aid.
It felt like a hardcore hot take when I first heard it, and I bet that’s true of a lot of peeps here.

>Figuring out how a state can do all 3 reliably is a large part of the Reaction

The ‘state’ is a modern invention, we need to revert to small nations, and take this ‘state’ thing out of the equation altogether. The ‘state’ should not exist, it has foisted itself into our nations, and we need to foist it back out again.

Theonomy is the answer. Answer directly to Jehovah, just a few hundred laws, some judes, local charity, no adultery, no theft, no murder, no sodomy. And your nation blessed with mighty powers against heathens too!

‘Where do we sign’ I hear you all cry?
Give me a few months, the website will be up.

Yeah, that’s why I expect all of that to vanish over the next c.20-50 years. Combination of grand solar minimum, volcanoes, nukes, droughts, plagues. Just a few clicks of Jehovah’s fingers to demolish man’s hubristic achievements.

What follows depends on our collective response, if we find faith, we get another shot, if not, that’ll be that.

>The problem is, what’s to stop the same companies making the same arguments just as successfully to Hans Hoppie’s covenant community associations and being just as successful at having them pretend to believe them?

Because when they offer the bribes to get the new rules put in place they’re offering them to the actual owners of the government who have an incentive to maximize the value of their enterprise and don’t want to reduce that value (that they don’t control) in exchange for a shot of cash (that they do control).

The falsity of this has been the single most potent red pill of the past three or four years.
The idea that fully private enterprises seek to maximise profit is intuitively so plausible that it just MUST be so and doesn’t need to be examined.
Unfortunately, the real world has shown us repeatedly that it is not in fact so.

To pander to minorities? Just how many mixed race relationships are there? Most minorities aren’t interested in dating/marrying outside their tribe: their tribe’s too fragile to risk making things harder. It sucks to be a minority.

I am old, and I know how capitalism used to work. I was there, I was part of it. Joint Stock Corporations sought to maximize profit until very recently.

This has ended with the rising power of accounting and human resources, ended with Sarbannes Oxley. Since accounting and human resources are tentacles of the state inserted into each corporation, they compete on holiness, rather than return to shareholders.

>I am old, and I know how capitalism used to work. I was there, I was part of it. Joint Stock Corporations sought to maximize profit until very recently.

Profit is very nice, but some things are even better than maximum profit, like state-facilitated monopoly, i.e. little or no competition and guaranteed profit for all time. After all, stockholders don’t just want to maximize profit now, they want to maximize profit now and into the future, and maybe they don’t even want most to maximize profit now and into the future. Maybe, if what is most valuable to stockholders is capital appreciation (and the appearance thereof), because the Boomer is less an investor and more a speculator, then the corporations need the cooperation of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve to keep the bubbles blowing and blowing and blowing….

Or why would Peter Thiel tell us that capitalism and competition are antonyms, and every founder ever should aim for monopoly or die trying?

Jim wrote: “I am old, and I know how capitalism used to work. I was there, I was part of it. Joint Stock Corporations sought to maximize profit until very recently.

This has ended with the rising power of accounting and human resources, ended with Sarbannes Oxley. Since accounting and human resources are tentacles of the state inserted into each corporation, they compete on holiness, rather than return to shareholders.”

That’s completely true, but it’s exactly like saying “we just need to get back to the Constitution. These entitlements, they’re just not Constitutional: the Constitution clearly states……..”

Businesses in the 20th century are a mirror image of the liberal experiment as a whole: at first they tore down the aristocracy in the name of leaving bourgeois businessmen alone to produce value.
Then those bourgeois businessmen took an amoral, red in tooth and claw approach that felt very much like selfish callousness to the people doing the hard work at the bottom, so those people called for a seat at the table and got it. Then those people started turning it all into a gibs train where wealth just appears out of thin air and gets carved up like a pie. (Mixed metaphors are a good metaphor for liberalism.)

What you’re describing is exactly the same.

At the early stages, companies maximised profit, free from aristocratic oppressive hot air about ‘society’, and the economy benefited (unsurprisingly: lot of capital left over when you DON’T build Salisbury Cathedral). To the people doing the actual hard work, this felt like job security had gone, as had their bargaining power over wages: everything was ruthless – the efficiency was ruthless, the management was ruthless, the punishment for failure was ruthless, the ability to think about something other than just push push push, that was ruthless too. It was all ruthless. So they got themselves some Ruth.

And here we are: to please the Ruth of the masses, corporations care more about holiness than profit. Why? Because in the current year, a HOLY company that loses money will be bailed out, which makes holiness more strategically important than money. An UNHOLY company that makes money will be preyed upon.

In addition to that, since everyone’s holy-obsessed, it’s inevitable that every institution will have to be holy just because of the people it draws on to be its participants. Import a million Somalis and you get Somalia. School a million nutjobs and you get Nutjobbia.

If you run USG’s accounts according to solid GAAP principles, you end up with a debt of something like 10X GDP, worse than even Japan. Ergo, GAAP principles had to be replaced. And it had to be replaced everywhere, or it would look like special pleading.

Of course this is also an opportunity to force businesses to basically put ‘government approval’ as a line item on the budget, and those without it looking as if they’re losing money.

>The idea that fully private enterprises seek to maximise profit is intuitively so plausible that it just MUST be so and doesn’t need to be examined.
Unfortunately, the real world has shown us repeatedly that it is not in fact so.

>Correct, and are the corporations rioting in the streets, applying pressure to governments to bring back the Constitution?

Who ever predicted they would?

Poz – even when it doesn’t make money directly – maximizes the long term value of any enterprise. The market functions by weeding out firms that fail to maximize the value of their enterprise. The “problem” is that corps are following the non-market incentive to push poz over the market signal to not do that. Why? Because that’s what government incentivizes and government controls the entire economy because we have a fiat currency and a maturity transforming banking sector (which means that there’s no actual private wealth).

We *have* communism now – the reason we’re getting worse results than Soviet communism is because our bureaucrats are less sane than their Soviet counterparts.

The reason we’re getting better results in some areas is because the Soviet example is in the past and some remnant of sanity remains that remembers the lessons from it.

Are you happy with Poz so long as there’s a free market liberated from central planners?

I’m sorry but I’m just not, at all. I’d rather live in 1988 Berlin not because I love five year plans, Soviets deciding what brands of breakfast cereal will be on the shelves (if any) and tanks on every corner.
I’d rather live in 1988 Berlin than 2018 Berlin because 2018 Berlin’s violent, rapey and full of filth, while 1988 Berlin isn’t.
I’d feel safer, more at home, in the 1988 version of Berlin.

(I use Berlin rather than London not because of any preference for it – quite the opposite in fact. The reason is that 1988 Berlin had the worst kind of economic policy imaginable to one of our mindset. The thing is, in spite of that policy – or (red pill) because of it – it doesn’t suffer from what 2018 Berlin suffers from under global relatively free trade.)

TV culture was created by the Jews in service of liberalism. Or do think it’s an accident that Hollywood is allowed to abuse contracts with impunity? Morbid Obesity is primarily a product of Harvard’s pro sugar anti-fat crusade which is firmly rooted in veganism. Before the 60s everyone knew that sugar made you fat. After the Harvard got involved animal fats where blamed while sugar was considered fine.

>Nitpick – fat is almost certainly driven by substituting vegetable oils (which are actually industrial seed oils) for animal fats and possibly the combination of these evolutionarily novel fats with the added sugar / carbs.

Take a look at “The Case Against Sugar: Gary Taubes”. According to Taubes, The historical comparison between sugar consumption and obesity is more closely correlated with increases in sugar consumption rather than vegetable oils going back some 600 years. Obesity used to be a disease of the rich in previous centuries and rich folks were certainly not consuming vegetable oils. Not that vegetable oils are good for you, they’re just a smaller factor in people becoming really fat.

So further digging has demonstrated that the graph that I had in mind is compromised and is a lie (showed sugar consumption going down recently with obesity still growing) – the result of sugar industry lobbying causing the USDA to change how it estimates sugar consumption.

>According to Taubes, The historical comparison between sugar consumption and obesity is more closely correlated with increases in sugar consumption rather than vegetable oils going back some 600 years.

But at least the schools are great, people can plan for the future, and perversities do not become industries of immense profit.

No, sorry. Schools are merely adequate, people have no incentive to plan for the future because they can’t acquire property, and in addition, culture slowly but surely degrades because it’s not possible to instill in people respect for property if your ideology is based on demonizing property. (Later generations don’t get the joke.)

Unless by communism you mean Chinese communism, which is communism only nominally, but de facto fascism.

They were comparing the past with the present, as most fans of communism are apt to do. I’m fairly sure that pre-civil rights education in America was more than competitive with its Russian counterpart, even though I have personal impressions of neither.

At some point we’ll be comparing rates of decline, and while Russian education did very likely decline more slowly, the difference is not due to the economic system. The iron curtain just stopped the poz.

I can only say the same thing to you as I said in the first place: would you rather live in Berlin in 1988 under communism or Berlin in 2018 under Mrs Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democrats’ coalition of the reasonable?

Once a strong leader has been securely established, and all the nit-picking, argumentative checks&balances removed forever, that strong leader can seek wise counsel and make sound decisions.

Some of those will appeal to us armchair social engineers and some won’t, but the sheer difference in quality between military precision and singularity of purpose vs what we have now (with endless committees, white and green papers and appeals processes) will immediately persuade anyone worth persuading, and anyone who remains committed to the insistence that every living person has a stake in designing society can be jailed for heresy.

>Because the authority of the father was supplanted by the authority of the state.

True

>>fast food is endemic, the commoners and their daughters are corn-fed fat

>And yet, those who seek to be healthy, successfully manage to be healthy.

Notice how much weaker your argument here is. One of the actual flaws of capitalism is that it matches buyers and sellers and does so with complete indifference to any harm that people will do to themselves by being able to satiate the wants. Coca-cola will make you fat and miserable? Yep – capitalists will drown you in it too if you can pay a nominal fee because that makes them money.

This flaw is only “corrected” by socialism in the sense that you can’t buy *anything*.

>indifference to any harm that people will do to themselves by being able to satiate the wants.

An argument can be made, however, that giving people exactly what they want — till they choke on it to death — is quite eugenic. I mean, it’s a benevolent way to cull off the weak-willed from society. Certainly more benevolent than killing them off by other means.

Let them kill themselves – with a smile on their own faces.

Sure, it’s ugly to look at, from the outside. But, well, prosperity is made feasible by compromises; the majority is distasteful anyway, so let them grow fat and fatter, while those of superior quality successfully resist the capitalism-enabled modern onslaught of bad dietary habits.

Or in other words: communism forces you to be a skeleton, but capitalism does not, in fact, force you to be obese.

“An argument can be made, however, that giving people exactly what they want — till they choke on it to death — is quite eugenic.”

Have you ever tried to imagine the society in which that would be celebrated?
The intellectuals may have flirted with social Darwinism around the start of the 20th century in America but it was never put into practice for the general population and wouldn’t have been tolerated if it had been.

I’m yet to meet an ancap who didn’t insist that private charity would be terribly important in ‘the free society’, so in practice it means they wouldn’t tolerate that outcome. I can easily envisage covenant community management corporations having part of their fee devoted to healthcare for the ‘poor and unfortunate’ (ie. people who ate the most profitable food and consumed plenty of profitable entertainments).

Capitalism’s dysgenic. Compare and contrast Russian women after three generations of communism and American women after three generations of emancipation.

Again, not defending communism, just saying it compares more favourably than you might think with where capitalism’s actually led us. What we need is capitalism red in tooth and claw, for sure, but restrained where it matters (food, culture, etc.) by an all-powerful fascist state.

What I’m calling capitalism is what everyone else calls capitalism: the voluntary exchange of goods and services.

American communism is very much that. Sure it’s not as pure as Tom Woods might want, but it’s not very far off it quite frankly. Sure some of the regulations are onerous, but when you consider that people are getting fat from eating junk food, catching exotic STDs and getting counselling for video game addiction, it’s hard to make the case that that’s a society in which trade’s micromanaged by rigid trade councils.

The point is, when LGBTQ++ started to be pushed, business saw the money to be made and jumped right on board. With the race blender experiment, business decided to go avant-garde in spite of the fact it cost them money.

The idea that business is anything other than a core part of The Cathedral is absurd. Our attitude to business should be roughly that of our attitude to academia and the media.

It’s only our libertarian prejudices that turn us into apologists for Richard Branson and Peter Thiel.

****I think it is clear that capitalism, for all intents and purposes, is just as much of a failure as communism has been. What are communism and capitalism but two sides of the same coin?

Agreed, more or less. It could not be stated loudly enough that modern Capitalism and Socialism are the same in this sense: they both view Man solely as an economic unit, devoid of any social or spiritual context.

From a fairly recent article, quoting the head of Canada’s central bank:

The head of the Bank of Canada is pointing to Quebec’s subsidized child-care program as a possible tool to boost the entire economy because it could significantly raise female workforce participation across the country.

…

Helping more women, young people, Indigenous peoples, recent immigrants and Canadians living with disabilities enter the job market could help the labour force expand by half a million people, he said. By his estimate, that kind of workforce injection could raise the country’s output by $30 billion per year or 1.5 per cent.

“That’s equal to a permanent increase in output of almost $1,000 per Canadian every year, even before you factor in the possible investment and productivity gains that would come with such an increase in labour supply,”

….

“Clearly, that is a prize worth pursuing.”

…

Poloz highlighted Quebec’s child-care program as one model to help women, which he noted represent the largest source of economic potential, enter the workforce.

He credited the province’s child-care program for raising prime-age female workforce participation from 74 per cent 20 years ago to about 87 per cent today. In comparison, he said about 83 per cent of prime-age women participate in the national workforce.

…

“If we could simply bring the participation rate of prime-age women in the rest of Canada up to the level in Quebec, we could add almost 300,000 people to our country’s workforce,” said Poloz, who noted the central bank has no role in implementing specific policies designed to break down labour-force barriers.

………………………………

According to this man, boosting the economy by tearing away every last woman – I mean, every last Economic Producer – from her family is a “prize worth pursuing”. This IS the horrifying, soulless worldview of the late-stage capitalist: “We shall view Man (and Woman) as a Unit of Productivity, and only Productivity matters, not family, not relationships, not spirituality…”

When it comes to socialism vs. capitalism, I am not exactly in the “one is as bad as the other” camp, but clearly any system aimed at economic production as an end in itself is in error.

>According to this man, boosting the economy by tearing away every last woman – I mean, every last Economic Producer – from her family is a “prize worth pursuing”. This IS the horrifying, soulless worldview of the late-stage capitalist: “We shall view Man (and Woman) as a Unit of Productivity, and only Productivity matters, not family, not relationships, not spirituality…”

We trade humanity for wealth, we get wealth, and we wonder why nihilism is so appealing.

That’s Fapitalism. The bank has been given incentives by the government to push policies the government wants under the rubric of it’s for the economy. In this case, a carrot, like federal insurance for minority mortgages would have been. Well, transparent federal insurance would be too transparent, so they had after-the-fact one-off bailouts for the banks they liked and demanded kickbacks for the Party and its’ NGOs.

> But at least the schools are great,
In USSR? Not really. After Uncle Joe education system was divorced from externally imposed demand (military and other strategical goals), turned into bureaucracy chewing on its own tail and slowly rotted stupid. Just not to the degree of Common Core.
> people can plan for the future,
Is it supposed to be an always good thing? Because a dude thrown out of a helicopter without parachute have very predictable future as well.
> and perversities do not become industries of immense profit.
Is this a goal in itself? And if so, why would anyone care much for specifically this one point?
> In capitalism, the schools are profit-maximizing diploma mills,
How so?
Diplomas are no different from any other self-certification of a product. The consumers of which are employers of the alumni.
In a market where the schools compete, the employers are free to value less or ignore altogether the lower-quality diplomas, and have obvious incentives to do so. Then diploma mills are no more or less of a trouble than any other snake oil enterprise: an ever-present, but never overwhelming threat.
Conversely, if the employers are not allowed to treat bullshit diplomas as not worth the paper on which they are printed, this devalues all diplomas, but clearly is not a result of market forces.

Quango certification is a bad idea. Either the government certifies directly or there needs to be a marketplace with insurance backing certification. An employer should be able to sue a university if a graduate doesn’t know what they certified him as knowing, if schools are still a thing in the future.

Schools should not be a highly hierarchical organizations. Lectures are awful at conveying knowledge. Administrators are renowned for meddling in the affairs of teachers, who if they can’t teach shouldn’t be teaching.

Schools should not concern themselves with job training, at which they’re terrible, and which debase the Platonic ideal of the school, the conduit by which ancient philosophical knowledge is transmitted.

Apprenticeship is by far the most effective means to transmit hard skills from generation to generation, and the childlike ignorance of the apprentice can benefit the wizened master nearly as much as the other way around.

Show me a school performing mostly job training and little patronage network creation and I’ll show you a sleazy, for-profit enterprise. Show me a school performing little job training and mostly patronage network creation and I’ll show you Harvard.

Teaching the next generation is one of the very most important function in all of society. Schoolteaching must be one of its most elite functions. Schoolteachers should be some of the most- rather than least-respected professionals, should be paid on par with comfortable, upper-middle-class professional work, and should be drawn from the best and the brightest and be more eccentric and less strive-y than other professionals of similar grade. Naturally, every person currently drawing a paycheck from the government for performing the voodoo rituals regarded by the government as “teaching” must be fired and re-hired only if he Makes The Grade.

Government certification is modern-day guildcraft, except the guild gives up its own QA to nameless, faceless bureaucrats hundreds or thousands of miles away.

College should mostly be a place where really smart men hang out for a few years in late adolescence to early adulthood at the cost of a few years of earning potential and with no expectation of getting ahead in the stupid, insane, and pointless zero- to negative-sum rat-face rat-race.

>lectures are great
>the least dogmatic and most curious people I know were lectured to least

Q.E.D.?

Lectures are a great way of feeling like you’re learning tons something without actually learning much of everything, or TED would never have risen above footnote status. Sometimes they can be more helpful than written documentation, and I find this true for certain computer programs as well, but only as a side reference while the main thing you’re doing is actually figuring out what visuospatial manipulation goes with what symbolic process.

However, much like sermons, they’re quite good at conveying morality, and like sermons they’re great for catalyzing community spirit. When Harvard went coed in 1977, the first target was its lectures.

My ideal of capitalism is corporate capitalism from Charles the second dignifying the corporate pursuit of profit in the restoration starting in 1660, to priests getting the upper hand and complaining about the greedy capitalists starting about 1820.

Did that form of capitalism have those pathologies of which you complain?

The difference between that capitalism and today’s capitalism was one stop regulation – that a corporation needed to have its business plan approved, but it could get a single approval from the state for its business plan, instead of needing a thousand approvals from a thousand meddlesome bureaucrats each holier than each of the others.

I more or less agree with you, but the spiritual motivations of the aristocrat and the spiritual motivations of the capitalist are not equal, or even similar.

The three basic social classes map on to Freud with shocking accuracy.
prole-id
bourgeoisie-ego
aristocrat-superego

The things that make one a good capitalist also limit the “hero CEO” from effectively ruling or planning for the future. He can only see mechanical relationships and human utility.

Bureaucracy stems from the bourgeois mindset. All the failed burghers are desperate for a little slice of power, the ability to say yes or no, and they trail like remoras after the successful burgher. Like how ancap fails when a corporate body achieves a monopoly and begins acting as a state.

Your ideal capitalism requires a king or aristocracy to sanction a corporate mission. The question they ask themselves isn’t “is this profitable” but “is this good for society”. Thus you need a class above and separate from even the “hero CEO”, because the things that make the Randian ubermensch a successful CEO also preclude him from thinking historically and making judgements that bear on aesthetic or spiritual questions.

The origins of feminism began, as you make abundantly clear, when it came to be believed that women were inherently holy and only corruptible by men. The class that came to believe this was England’s nouveaux-riche, your hero-capitalists, who were aping ancient aristocrat notions of chivalry without a speck of spiritual understanding.

In reality, women in medieval times who defected were punished brutally, and it was taken for granted that women had the seed of evil inherent to their natures. But the idea that King Uther’s murder of his comrade-in-arms to fuck his wife, and Gwynevere’s fucking of her husband’s comrade-in-arms, are spiritually equivalent actions that lead to civil war, never occurred to the Hero-CEO class, who read nice poems about knights being gentlemanly to pretty girls, and started signalling against the ducking-stool.

Even the Hero-CEO is and must be, to the King, a contractor hired by the King to make use of the physical and human capital that is the King’s property. The contractor is a capable man of considerable expertise, but his contracted use of the King’s estate does not and must not give him legal interest in said property. If I discover a rare earth mineral beneath my land, I may hire a miner to come dig it up. I will likely give him the right to sell this mineral to his profit, as long as I get a rightful cut. If this miner comes back and tells me that now he owns my land, or if he tries to cut me out of the profits, or if he harasses me in an attempt to get me to sell the land, I am entitled to take him out into my woods and shoot him in the back of the neck, and so it is with the King and the Capitalist.

Excellent comment that I almost skipped due to the early reference to the Jew fraud Freud’s terminology. Avoiding stating things that cause intelligent readers to want to skip your writing is more effective rhetoric.

This:

>Even the Hero-CEO is and must be, to the King, a contractor hired by the King to make use of the physical and human capital that is the King’s property

Freud was a hack who told nothing but lies, but he unwittingly touched on a useful tripartite heuristic for describing human motivations. But justifying its use to other reactionaries in terms of caste theory is off-topic here and would take a very long post.

(1) appetites passions reason is Aquinas, Freud’s role was to make it sciency and add sex. Dualism is Plato and Descartes, Aristotle should hake kicked Plati’s ass for faggotry.
(2) numerology. What if there were 4 classes, elites, bougies, lower middle class, quasi-criminal lumpen? What if there were 2, aries and normalfags the aries provide with personal protection on exchange for personal loyalty?

Oh yeah I forgot
(3) you’d think boogers would have some humility after they voted for Hillary while the lower middle class and quasi-criminal class they like to pretend the lower middle class is while sibsidizing it with the lower middle class’s resources voted for Trump. But boogers want to pretend to be aries in an arie/normalfag system even though they hate aries and arie noblesse oblige.

>The question they ask themselves isn’t “is this profitable” but “is this good for society”.

That’s a bunch of poopycock and you know it. The nobility were a bunch of basically mafiosi who descended upon the weak remains of the western empire and divided up the land among themselves and were looking out solely for their own interests (which worked out rather well* in the end, as a matter of fact). The only one who talked about the common good was the church. Nobility mostly wanted the church to leave it alone to its hunting, carousing, and jousting.

* – See old Jim posts on mobile VS stationary bandits. Had they not set themselves up as the proprietors of the subjugated territories they would not have defended Europe from Huns and Muzzies, nor would they have maintained law and order that permitted the civilization to flourish.

You’re still buttblasted about the Protestant Reformation, aren’t you? Give up the Ghost, mang. It was right, it’s ancient history, and your monasteries are never coming back. The best you’ll get is HPYS & Co., which is the reason for the memin’; the totalitarian spirit never really dies, it’s only subdued for a while, and the Eternal Papist has metastasized again.

The dissolution of the monasteries in the late 1530s was one of the most revolutionary events in English history. There were nearly 900 are over 4,000 religious houses in England America, around 260 for monks, 300 for regular canons, 142 nunneries and 183 friaries; some 12,000 people in total, 4,000 monks, 3,000 canons, 3,000 friars and 2,000 nuns. 1,900 for private four-year students, 600 for public four-year students, 600 for private two-year students, and 1,100 for public two-year students; some 18,000,000 enrollment in total, 7,000,000 public four-year students, 4,000,000 private four-year students, 6 million public two-year students, and 300,000 private two-year students. If the adult male population was 500,000, If the adult population was 350 million, that meant that one adult man man or woman in fifty twenty was in religious orders.

I disagree Michael, on the “nobility as greedy bandits”; see the enclosure movement in England. Early 1500s, new money (made their wealth doing trade and banking) began buying up extinct noble titles, and kicking peasants off of their land to graze sheep on the former farms. Which was far more profitable, but put a lot of peasants out of a job. King Henry said no, and the House of Lords said no, and put an end to it.

The old money nobles could have done the same thing, they knew it was more profitable, but they still chose to not kick the peasants off of their land, and in fact made it illegal to do so. At the time, the “valiant beggar” i.e. able-bodied unemployed man, was practically unheard of and considered a disgusting social ill. Which says a lot about the economic stability of feudalism.

That changed after Henry’s death, when the greedy and short-sighted Lord Protectors that followed him made it legal in order to pay off England’s war debts. Which caused massive inflation and unemployment (at a level that today we would consider routine), to the extent that many believed that the end times were upon England.

King Henry’s peacetime taxes, by the way, amounted to 2% of income. His wartime taxes were at 15%. In terms of purchasing power, his entire government was run on the modern equivalent of $24 million. He was considered an unusually decadent monarch who levied heavy taxes and spent far too much on his court. I don’t see any ‘capitalist’ state, even the most laissez-faire, letting you keep that much of your money.

Firstly, feudalism was pretty much dead in France and England by the end of the 13th century, if not earlier. Secondly, Henry’s nobles weren’t real nobles but lackeys that got rewarded for their infidelity to the church by lands pillaged from the church. Note that when Henry pillaged the church, he looted not only temples and monasteries, but also pillaged the numerous charities that made beggary unnecessary in the earlier era. The ones practicing enclosure basically did the same thing, they were thieves that robbed the villagers. Only different side of the coin. Thirdly, when you’ve got maximum wage laws in place, and laws restricting the labor mobility you are going to end up with lot of unemployment, as people are going to beg rather than work an awful job for what they can gain by begging. And Tudors really liked their maximum wage laws (and labor mobility restrictions too). And finally inflation. Inflation was caused by the fact that Henry emptied the coins of their precious metal content nigh completely (which was, in fact, drove neo-nobles to do enclosures in the first place). So sure, the nominal tax rate wasn’t high, but if you include the outright pillage he has done, and the “inflation tax” it was atrociously high.

In order to keep it great, there is no choice but to employ psychopathic trolling tactics against those commenters — they know who they are — who don’t ever seem to contribute anything valuable to the discussion, and what’s more, constantly degrade the level of the discourse by e.g. writing walls of unpunctuated text, sperging out with the same inane talking points all over the place, etc.

Since Jim doesn’t often apply censorship against the disruptive commenters, it is up to the other commenters to get rid of the trouble makers – by brutal methods, if need be.

Interesting parallel to Freud. That stems partly from classes being at different places on Maslow’s hierarchy; aristocrats can self-actualize.

“Bureaucracy stems from the bourgeois mindset. All the failed burghers are desperate for a little slice of power, the ability to say yes or no, and they trail like remoras after the successful burgher.”

Nah. Laws are easier to create than destroy, hence we get more and more laws. Parasitic positions within government (or large corporations) are easier to create than destroy -because the parasites will defend their positions- hence we get more and more bureaucratic jobs and classes of jobs.

This is a big problem with Deng stye communism, and it was a big problem with early corporate capitalism – if your business plan was to compete with a business that had friends at court, hard to get approval for your business plan. But nonetheless, Deng style communism is doing well, and early corporate capitalism did well.

The king will not let his friend’s bloated bureaucratic monopoly business die – but if you need the approval of a thousand holy bureaucrats each holier than each of the others, they will damned well kill your business.

Of note, the same Boyz that do well in Amerika pushed for China to be admitted to the WTO, Kissinger et al.

No doubt big biz has done remarkably well from that paradigm change, US workers, not so well. Chinese workers? Well, effectively slaves, on subsistence wages, far from kith and kin. Likely not at all happy, but unhappy people buy more shit, need more houses, more debt.

Gosh, seems like the capitalists have worked the same magic in China as elsewhere in the world doesn’t it? Deng was duped.

PPP is invalid. A household of $6K in China does live comfortably. Most of what you need money for in the US is a car to get to work and the shops, extraordinary housing costs to get away from diversity, extraordinary healthcare costs for the minority who have actually have a job, and extraordinary education costs.

A $6K household in the US is not poor because $6K cannot buy food, clothing, and housing. It is poor because $6K cannot buy distance between your kids and black kids.

Compared to what was before, the Chinese standard of living has improved tremendously.

There’s an amusing anecdote how the UN Official Program for Fighting Poverty had to quietly wind itself down and disappear when China lifted so many out of poverty that it made the program obsolete by achieving the planned milestones decades in advance.

Glosoli, you know as well as anyone that dollars are fake and only children with futures are real wealth. So why do you lie about wealth in China? Obviously they are irrelevant because they are chinks and nothing they do matters.

You fall into the capitalist’s trap of viewing an increase in income and a move to the big city as something good for people. Much like those who live in big cities in the West, people are far less happy when compared to times when labour mobility was near-zero.

No, it’s much like the link/comments someone shared elsewhere on this thread from the Canadian central bank chief. Their motivation is to squeeze as much wealth as possible from the resources within the state, and that always includes the people.

If you or Jim or anyone trumpets ‘standards of living’, you’re just blue-pilled on this issue, and blind to the ongoing corporate plan to enslave the world.

As for China’s bankers, and printing currency, it’s the same in every nation (except the eurozone), so bankers are just part of the problem, profiting from usury, taking the money and investing in hard assets (mostly overseas in the case of the Chinese) and sitting back waiting for the Minsky moment.

Once democracy is ditched, we’ll all be living in a version of China,like rats in a cage.

(1) bankers are subservient to the government, here, in China, everywhere
(2) democracy means rule by jews. Rule by chinks isn’t much different because jews and chinks aren’t that different, they both build buildings that fall over, China sells cadmium earrings and jews have more elaborate ways of poisoning us, though while China executes corrupt officials, Israel is small enough that corrupt officials all cover for each other.
(3) quality of life is a real thing. It it proportional to what kind of life you can give your children.
(4) living in a city is good provided the city is a good place to live.
(5) when we get rid of democracy we will have vastly better quality of life, including in the cities

First you say 6000 fiat dollars isn’t much, then you say fiat land held in aggregate is a thing. This is typical of your careless thinking. Unfortunately ((Jehovah)) doesn’t have a canned answer for you.

Everyone in China was very poor. Now everyone in China is fairly well off – all them. All of them. Except that with female emancipation, the betas are getting left out as usual, but hunger and poverty is simply gone.

And some are very rich.

Sexual inequality really bites, but everyone in China, everyone, has enough food and stuff that material inequality is unimportant. Under Mao style communism, before it was glorious to get rich, many people starved.

So many people think they’re rich right now, and it’s all about to come tumbling down. the currencies I mean, not the markets.

Did you see the chart showing the huge increase in China household’s debt levels, in just 10 years. It’s all fake wealth.

Just like in the West, and I cannot wait for it to burst, and watch the bubble players crying.

As for starvation, here’s something you should know: we’re at the start of a 9 year drought cycle, food will become scarce, and Deng, Trump, no one will be able to a thing about it. And guess why it’s coming now? Yep, all part of those curses.

Honestly Jim, I can’t believe you’re sat there singing the praises of Deng-style Chinese success, especially at this point in history. We’ll look back on this thread in the years ahead and laugh, when I mention that you called the top.

Your ideal capitalism requires a king or aristocracy to sanction a corporate mission. The question they ask themselves isn’t “is this profitable” but “is this good for society”. Thus you need a class above and separate from even the “hero CEO”, because the things that make the Randian ubermensch a successful CEO also preclude him from thinking historically and making judgements that bear on aesthetic or spiritual questions.

This is true. But without Clive we don’t get world conquest. Without Shockley we don’t get the transistor.

Used to be you had to have your corporate business plan approved “Is this good for society”. And if you changed your business plan, you had to get it approved again, which was not easy. But you did not have to get a thousand approvals from a thousand different groups, each holier than each of the others. Regulation was a one stop shop.

The hero CEO cannot be a direct employee of the king or government that violates freehold and is socialism and makes the CEO a bureaucrat. This means the king loses control because he is trying to manage too much by himself.

But you make a good point about bureaucracy earlier in your post…

Prussia solved the problem of petty tyrannical bureaucrats by only allowing gentlemen into the upper grades, if not the right social class you couldn’t be promoted (this was generally true in the army in other European states but not the bureaucracy).

It also may explain why the Prussian bureaucracy tended to be so much more efficient then really any bureaucracy in history.

You’re thinking to narrowly about “petty tyrannical bureaucrats.” Think instead of any parasitic position within the economy, that includes most of HR, an alliance of social workers and welfare queens, many lawyers ect.. What motivates the creation of their jobs or class of jobs varies from time to time and position to position. Some of them were useful when they were created and outlived their use. Why the jobs were created is not terribly important to understand; is important to understand they are easy to create and hard to destroy so will constantly grow unless some active mechanism is constantly killing them. The US GOVERNMENT doesn’t have a mechanism so USG has grown massively parasitic with both overt government jobs and jobs that claim to be private but are actually government jobs (see most of HR, many Lawers ect…).

As to your point about the hero CEO. I think a lot of the disagreement in this sub-thread is because we haven’t defined the de facto scope of the kings oversight. Has to be some, too much gives you socialism.

HR are not government employees they are more like quasi government employees.

Jim did some definition of the king’s role in “Thone Altar and Freehold” it would be very little and on an ad hoc basis ideally, in saying that he should limit his scope because he shouldn’t delegate too many kingly powers because then you get an excessive bureaucracy.

Societal evolution drives inexorably towards more adaptive societies (on a macro scale). Socialist societies always fail, are not the future. But is freehold the future?

People might have been better off as foragers, but farming societies were more adaptive.

If china adopts genetic engineering and it makes their society more adaptive, debates are useless. We will adopt now or be conquered (hard or soft) and adopt then.
You say:
“The center needs to be stronger, much stronger, hence the neoreactionary demand for throne and altar, for a King, an Archbishop, and a Grand Inquisitor, but it can only be stronger if it abandons efforts to control more than a single man, or a small group of men, is capable of controlling.”

So how much will a small group of men be able to control with future technology. With an omnipresent surveillance state, media control, and technologies to cluster people and effectively target them with the right media to influence, what won’t they be able to control.

Your writing about effective societies sounds almost utopian. I’m not so sure. Single celled organisms evolved into multi-celled. What was good for the individual cells, not important, what kind of organization was adaptive was. What do you think the implications are of new and emerging technologies for centralized social control? Might it be a lot more than the past?

We hit the complexity limit on centralization in the late bronze age, and it has not shifted much.

One thing that could be done is to use centralized databases to reimpose marriage, or to reimpose serfdom or slavery. With centralized databases, it is no longer necessary that city air makes free. But back when slavery was legal, people found it was a waste to have high functioning slaves work under close coercive supervision (you hit the complexity limit on centralization) so high functioning slaves and high functioning serfs tended to wind up in situations similar to that of taxpaying subjects of a nearby King. Over time, this tended to result in all serfs who remained serfs, and all slaves who remained slaves being alarmingly low functioning people, even when, as in Russia, the serfs were the same race and religion as the masters.

I mean I see your point. Google knows the correlation between worker autonomy and productivity but I wouldn’t fame it as a ‘complexity limit on centralization.’

People can’t think independently. We think socially and using a culture we have inherited. Drop a baby by itself to be raised by monkeys in the jungle won’t develop language. Drop two, maybe twenty words by age 30. All of our thinking and actions are slight permutations of our culture. So if a centralized government under China or Google or whoever controls culture, what doesn’t it control. Still to the point you actually made, maybe not in their best interest to use the control.

I think people need a certain amount of work related autonomy to be productive. How much of the rest of their lives could be managed is hard to say. With the right pills, therapy, and information diet, might be different in the future than now.

“With an omnipresent surveillance state, media control, and technologies to cluster people and effectively target them with the right media to influence, what won’t they be able to control.”

This is already the case. For about one hundred years now the Foundations and their think tanks have been setting long-range policy by monotonously generating the thought-systems to be propagated via the schools and the newspapers and for the last fifty or so years the semihypnotic technological media (television and movies.)

In general, people cluster themselves far more effectively than targeting made possible by any modern technology. Buzzfeed, now defunct < Huffington Post < Washington Post < New York Times < CFR.org. The difference between the world-understandings of the CFR and Huffington Post reader is vast, though allegiance is shared.

Jim wrote: “The difference between that capitalism and today’s capitalism was one stop regulation – that a corporation needed to have its business plan approved, but it could get a single approval from the state for its business plan, instead of needing a thousand approvals from a thousand meddlesome bureaucrats each holier than each of the others.”

THIS.

(Is not laissez-faire, thank goodness, and in a very real sense it’s collective enough to constitute state planning of the economy, which is perhaps a better term than socialism.)

Yes, in a very real sense early corporate capitalism was socialism, in that the joint stock corporation’s business plan had to serve a state approved purpose, and if you wanted to do something else, needed to get a new approval, which made it very hard to change your business and your business plan. But, as with Deng’s communism, if your business plan also served the purpose of getting you rich and your shareholders rich, that was fine, indeed high status.

From the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century, the corporation was as socialist as Deng’s communism (it is glorious to get rich) is communist – and Deng’s communism is working fine, unlike Mao’s communism or Nicolás Maduro Moros’s socialism.

>Yes, in a very real sense early corporate capitalism was socialism, in that the joint stock corporation’s business plan had to serve a state approved purpose, and if you wanted to do something else, needed to get a new approval, which made it very hard to change your business and your business plan.

The key element of socialism (IMO) is that the approver is a committee – hence the eternal appeal of socialism to people who tolerate and even enjoy committee decision making – i.e., the evil and insane who control it and the weak who just like the idea that no one can make a decision without having to beg them for approval.

That’s like saying the key element of capitalism is political lobbying. It just doesn’t have to be that way, at all.

There’s no reason whatsoever why a fully socialised, tax-funded, state monopoly industry shouldn’t be run like a business. That’s the core principle of NRx/neo-cameralism after all. The only difference here is that instead of the entire nation-state, we’re talking about one sector in isolation, eg. railways.

Ancaps can form stupid Talmudic arguments for why and how aquifers can and should be privately owned, but why bother when the state can manage them instead?
The same’s true for railways, health and agriculture.

Management by committee is a superficial feature of communism arising mainly from a commitment to democracy and egalitarianism. Get rid of those prejudices and socialism (in the sense of a state monopoly funded through taxes) can be run just like a normal business – yes up to and including shareholders if needs be.

>Management by committee is a superficial feature of communism arising mainly from a commitment to democracy and egalitarianism.

Absolutely not.

“Communism” is transparent bullshit designed only as a justification for a mob that’s motivated by envy to actually stick together. Almost all of its ability to generate asabiyya comes from its appeal to people good at rhetoric and bad at actually accomplishing anything – hence why it *has* to be rule by committee – if it wasn’t it would fall apart before anyone could use it to seize power.

Calling a corporate form owned by an actual unified sovereign like a king “socialism” is mixing unlike things and violates the rectification of names.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking strictly about socialism in the sense that capitalist writers mean it: the economic model in which the state claims a monopoly over a given endeavour, bans competition and then centrally plans the delivery according to political goals rather than profit&loss, and where the consumer is not sovereign but is rather guided by the business not the other way round.

What you’re talking about is progressive redistribution, which almost always runs in parallel to socialism, but needn’t.

Envy is a sin and socialising key industries such as the media and academia is one way for society to tackle sins like envy.

“There’s no reason whatsoever why a fully socialised, tax-funded, state monopoly industry shouldn’t be run like a business. ”

If it’s tax-funded then it’s hardly likely to resemble a business; businesses need customers for their revenue.

As for the idea of running these entities like businesses – congratulations, you’ve just rediscovered 1990s Nu-labism. Australia did much the same thing in the 1990s, restructuring various, mostly monopoly, government commissions into formal, mostly statutory, businesses that didn’t require general government sector funding. So SECWA became “AlintaGas” and “Western Power”, Elcom in NSW became “Pacific Power”, OTC and Telecom became Telstra, QR’s freight division was spun off and is now Aurizon, SECV became a whole heap of businesses, etc.

And they actually did become more efficient (although being more efficient than an Australian government-owned utility is an exceptionally low bar). The problem, of course, is that they could never shake ministerial intervention, the end effect of which being that government-run industries wind up being run for the benefit of workers instead of customers (just like the public sector proper, and for the same reasons), so the scope of their improvement was limited (eg. Aurizon net haulage volumes rising despite laying off nearly half its workers since its float in late 2010).

Your idea for state-run pseudo-private businesses has been tried. It doesn’t work as well as you think it does.

You’re speaking to me as if I didn’t immerse myself in the Mises Institute library for a decade.

Everything Mises said about the impossibility of setting prices when the factors of production were detached from the price mechanism was 100% true.
Everything Hayek said about planning in general by any humans in any situation was also 100% true.

A monopoly firm owned and run by the state according to military single-mindedness and an unwavering focus on the health and wealth of the nation would most definitely be less profitable and efficient, on the average, than a Facebook or a Walmart.

The difference that justifies the nationalisation of Facebook AND WALMART is not an economic one, it’s a political one.

Yes it may be optimally profitable to sell people pizza, chocolate and fizzy drinks. Absolutely: the market has spoken!

But we’re NOT going to do that, because as a nation people are getting fat and unhealthy, so instead of farting around with sugar taxes etc. let’s just not sell pizza, chocolate and fizzy drinks in the first place.
If little poncey artisan bakers want to make pizzas, fine, they can buy a licence and charge accordingly. Maybe some lunatics genuinely do love the taste enough to pay Pizza Express times ten prices for it. I doubt it, but the market will decide!

What isn’t going to happen in a healthy society ruled by a genuine (as opposed to provisional, democratically beholden) leader is the fattening and weakening of the human stock. On the contrary: incentive structures will reflect what’s currently in need of ‘stimulus’ – if people on the average are getting enough dietary fibre, no need to stimulate it but if they’re not, we’ll stimulate it.

You get the picture: prosocial planned economy plus enough of a market to function.

What we have right now is an antisocial planned economy plus enough of a market to function.

The problem is that state-owned companies aren’t socially healthy either: they’re power centres and funding spigots for subversive poz actors like trade unions.

Inefficient companies can be inefficient for lots of reasons, most of them socially unhealthy. State-run companies don’t give you this “prosocial planned economy” you keep hallucinating about, they give you sponging trade unions and dysfunctional governments fighting rival power centres.

>Yes it may be optimally profitable to sell people pizza, chocolate and fizzy drinks. Absolutely: the market has spoken!

I’m not sure where you’re getting this shit from – government nutritional advice is responsible for people getting fat. Sugar has existed for millennia; it’s only in the past half-century or less that obesity has started becoming common.

Private property and natural rights are not the American Revolution. The AR was an attempt to preserve them against what seemed like a threat at the time. It failed to stop the expansion of democracy and spread of “equality.”

The problem with America today is that we do have an aristocracy with no skin in the game: the managerial class. Government bureaucrats, corporate managers, NGO employees, university employees. They bear no personal liability for the outcome of their actions. A lot of problems could be solved, or at least clarified, by increasing personal liability. Student loans? Let them default. Let them or the bank sue the university. A university is best positioned to know if a student is a good credit risk. If they give the student a bullshit degree, the bank should have recourse. The student should be able to sue for being sold a shoddy good. CEOs should be personally liable for selling bad drugs and environmental disasters that involve negligence. As should the head of the EPA and the bureaucrats involved when they poison a river.

The AR occured because John Hancock realized that the British policy was moving more and more towards turning its American colonies into another Ireland and managed to convince a lot of the rest of the colonial gentry of it too, some of course just wanted power (Hamilton) some were just rabble rousers (Thomas Paine). I used to oppose the AR but not after I realized the Ireland thing.

What I don’t understand is why any of the Southern planter types rebelled, they would have done fine out of the mercantile system.

I’m not sure how that would work. The US was richer then England, had large amounts of area to grow and was too vast for the England to run like Ireland. Even the Quebec Act doesn’t change the balance significantly. The United States would probably have as many people as England by 1850 which puts even more of a damper on control.

“What I don’t understand is why any of the Southern planter types rebelled, ”

First is money; pretty sure many were in debt and revolution gives you a chance to default on your creditors. The second is Somerset v Stewart.

Yes. Hold the QuANGO certifying a faggot responsible when the faggot fucks up and causes damage, or, create a culture of trusting a guarantee exactly as far as it’s backed by insurance. No one should ever spend more than a thousand dollars on something that isn’t insured.

When your credit card gets stolen, the company that issued is responsible for fraudulent transactions, meaning their guys make sure no one can get anything from a stolen credit card, instead of you being responsible for whatever and then you’re the stingy jackass having to track down and take a nigga to court for 50$.

With medicine, it seems like the buyer’s responsibility for choosing that particular doctor, instead of the shadowy certification authority for licensing them. This also eliminates all the cringy-ass IANAL statements from Internet lawyers because everyone will know that if you’re not waving your insurance in their face.

Natural Law teaching and the sanctity of property are much older than Whigs and Framers, and are the cornerstone of Medieval Catholic political theory. Royal absolutism only came in post-Reformation / early Enlightenment. The Whigs got by mostly by abusing and perverting the Scholastic texts, while at the same time denying that anything of value came from Catholicism or the Middle Ages — “Oh look Oliver, those Iberians have a Cortes judge their kings, so we should have Parlament do the same! Wow! Those contemptible backwards and despotic Catholics.”

>What’s really wrong with the British NHS?

Everything! The thing is, socialism can only work very, very locally, and thus the farther away from the problem at hand it is, and the more stretched it gets the worse it is. At that level not even the charities are good. The principle of Subsidiarity should be the guide. Family is communist with father as a dictator, parish should be a social democracy that takes care of welfare, healthcare, and regulates the behavior of its parishioners, city an aristocratic republic, and the sovereign a wu-wei / oriental despot.

>let the bourgeoisie alone and we shall rule you with Smith’s invisible hand,

It is the 19th century reactionary myth that bourgeoisie wanted laissez-faire, laissez-passer, when it was the last thing it wanted. Indeed, the bourgeoisie did not even rid the world of slavery. They merely transferred the slaves from the fields and into the trenches. And they needed to get rid of the old monopolists (the guilds in the marketplace and the aristocracy in the state) so that they could install themselves as the new (and much more numerous and parasitic) monopolists, both in marketplace and state (hence the “equality before the law” opening up the state bureaucracy, and coffers, for all to plunder).

>That’s the job of the aristocracy: to keep the plebs AND the bougie cosmopolitan ‘makers’ in their place, well-behaved and deferential to higher values.

That’s exactly what we have today. Except those higher values are butt fragery, and cuckoldry. Heck, you used to read Mises. Well he was prone to attacking the neoliberals by stating that they are the exactly same as 19th century romantics and reactionaries in that they wanted to forcefully impose the purpose and worldview upon the populace (except neoliberals had the shit “higher” values).

>But so will unbridled laissez-faire capitalism.

“unbridled laissez-faire capitalism” just means absolute respect for property. If there was respect for property, you could have thriving trad communes. Outside their walls the sign that says “SODOMITES SHOT ON SIGHT” Far cry from today’s “Bake the cake, or else & 14 trillion dollars of regulatory overhead alone” capitalism.

“[Mises] was prone to attacking the neoliberals by stating that they are the exactly same as 19th century romantics and reactionaries in that they wanted to forcefully impose the purpose and worldview upon the populace”

Yes and he was question-begging. In a nutshell Mises’ argument here (and I’m embracing your characterisation as pretty accurate) is that this commonality is important enough to define the character of those systems. Not so, not at all.
The problems with the modern neoliberal order have to do with the content of their ideology and the inefficiency of their delivery: what Jim calls the Progressive religion and what Moldbug calls the Rotary System.

What Mises was proposing (broadly speaking an Ayn Randian police-only state) is very similar to globohomo. Just hang around left-libertarian communities for a while. New Hampshire was supposed to be Lew Rockwellville but in fact it was Woodstock. (“Free The Nipple” anyone?)

“If there was respect for property, you could have thriving trad communes.”

That’s the claim made by Rockwell and Hoppe but it’s not true. Covenant contracts would be the domain of large service provider companies, along the lines of a Serco or a G4S.
These firms would quickly realise that some social models were more profitable than others, more resilient to ‘activism’ than others and more easily replicated than others. Those models would tend to become cookie cutter defaults.

Sure for a century perhaps, Lew Rockwell’s catholic quietude community might prosper, but in the end everywhere ends up like Vegas or the Village under capitalism. Human beings need to be kept in check, and if they’re told they CAN choose to drink themselves silly and fool around with any willing ‘partner’, the terrible truth is they will tend to say ‘yes’ to those temptations.

In more primitive times, a Moses could pretend to have a little private one-to-one and come back with stability literally carved in stone when the calf-worshippers were wrecking civilisation yet again.
In these more cynical times, it takes something a little more hands on.

“And all the people saw the voices and the flames, and the sound of the trumpet, and the mount smoking: and being terrified and struck with fear, they stood afar off,
“Saying to Moses: Speak thou to us, and we will hear: let not the Lord speak to us, lest we die.”

Looks pretty hands-on to me. If we’re lucky we’ll see that cynicism overpowered – a lot of prophecies converge in our lifetime.

Functionalist criticism is great and all but leave some room for religion to claim what it’s actually claiming. If the universe is not irrational and perverse, then lying is not necessary for men to live among each other.

>”These firms would quickly realise that some social models were more profitable than others, more resilient to ‘activism’ than others and more easily replicated than others. Those models would tend to become cookie cutter defaults.

Sure for a century perhaps, Lew Rockwell’s catholic quietude community might prosper, but in the end everywhere ends up like Vegas or the Village under capitalism. Human beings need to be kept in check, and if they’re told they CAN choose to drink themselves silly and fool around with any willing ‘partner’, the terrible truth is they will tend to say ‘yes’ to those temptations.”

That’s why people are extremely happy to have the ability contract away their ability to do self destructive things or even things that are personally beneficial but collectively disastrous – restrictive covenants are a real product of the market – if it wasn’t they wouldn’t exist they’d have been coded into the law.

HOAs put all kinds of restrictions on what can be done with property. Capitalism has all kinds of solutions to people being short sighted – *it’s government that has banned many of these tools*.

I had always thought that New Hampshire was since the very begining meant for “libertarian because degenerate” libertarians and not for “libertarian because personal responsibility” libertarians.

>but in the end everywhere ends up like Vegas or the Village under capitalism

I don’t think so. In short, degeneracy is by its nature parasitic and thus only short term profitable, and even then only if there is a healthy society to leech off of. Whorehouses, casinos, opium dens and the like, and even much less evil stuff like bars and restaurants produce no capital, they only consume it. If capitalism means economy system based on capital creation (instead of consumption), it requires low-time preference non-degenerate behaviour to create and sustain it by definition.

Michael: “I had always thought that New Hampshire was since the very begining meant for “libertarian because degenerate” libertarians”

Equivalent to ‘Cuba wasn’t real socialism’.

Tom Woods was looking at Manchester NH at one point, and Wendy McElroy had a house there I think prior to the south-of-the-border fiasco where everyone forgot about access to water lol

“degeneracy is by its nature parasitic and thus only short term profitable, and even then only if there is a healthy society to leech off of”

What year’s the collapse coming?

Truth is, the collapse is already upon us. The degeneracy IS the collapse, and it can get an awful lot worse than this: just look at Brazil. If ‘short term’ means a few hundred years then yeah ok.

Steve: “HOAs put all kinds of restrictions on what can be done with property. Capitalism has all kinds of solutions to people being short sighted”

That’s an example of the modern phenomenon repeated but under different values. It’s not profitable in this quarter to behave that way, but capitalists of the past didn’t care about profit as much as they cared about their societal values. At that time it was a good thing, just as laissez-faire was good for the economy in the 19th century.

Nevertheless I can only repeat my prediction: in a Patchwork of covenant communities, the catholic ones would disappear in a couple of generations, to be replaced with a range of socially liberal options beginning with ‘live and let live: it works for economics so why not for social economics?’ and ending with ‘ancom trannies for Baal’.

But, whatever. I don’t really care either way. I do believe in enforcement of values and morals, I am not a libertarian. I just happen to think that you don’t need to become an economic basket case in order to do said enforcement. BTW economic basket cases usually are the most degenerate no matter how hard they trad-signal. Compare STD rates, drug abuse, abortion, etc. stats of Russia to Hong Kong stats.

Read Marx in the context of 19c England, he’s a reactionary saying industrial workers should be more like freeholders than serfs. We have quite a few working men here who agree; the union used to be what made working men into freeholders like the coop did for farmers when they started needing more buildings and machines than one man can reasonably own. Now the union steals their money and gives it to grad students who hate them.

Bernie promises the same level of universal healthcare we had before government intervention.

One major difference between Christians and angry drunken atheists is that Christians aren’t looking for something for nothing, though today’s churchians are both looking for something for nothing and willing to signal about being stolen from. That’s the big reason the cities are so ugly and run down – everyone in the city is unfriendly to hostile and no one is willing to put the work in to keep things nice, because everything just gets stolen and pissed on.

That’s why The Art of the Deal replaces the Bible. The Bible is about giving to everyone, while The Art of the Deal is about mutually beneficial exchanges and clear ownership which leads to stewardship, The Bible is about the destruction of Sodom and The Art of the Deal is about walling off a piece of Sodom and building Trump Tower.

What’s really wrong with the NHS is the myriad checks and balances, the weakness, the lack of leadership. Every decision passes through regulators, external auditors, unions, corporate governance associations, parliamentary committees, commissioners and all manner legal crittery.

Bureaucracy by its nature is a cancer driven to grow without limit and consume all resources it can, without any greater purpose or vision of the greater picture. And when vision, purpose and limits are imposed on it (usually, at the time of creation), it tries to wriggle out and throw them off.
And socialism is rule of bureaucracy.
It’s that simple.

That’s also part of why “capitalism” is deceptive when left ill-defined.
Corporate bureaucracy is not different from state bureaucracy, it’s the same mindless plankton of power, just with more limits… for a while.

What libertarian economics woefully gets wrong however is the idea that the aristocracy is ALSO a cancer: let the bourgeoisie alone and we shall rule you with Smith’s invisible hand, mass production for the benefit of the masses. Yeah except when the masses act like morons (as Pareto’s Law says half of them always will), the bourgeoisie loses money if it stops them!!!

That’s the job of the aristocracy: to keep the plebs AND the bougie cosmopolitan ‘makers’ in their place, well-behaved and deferential to higher values.

If it has no services for which others have demand, it is cancer — or will become cancer in no time.
And everyone else has incentive to burn it out.
Note that the socialists’ vision (it slips through all the time) looks more or less like feudalism minus two-sided obligations/contracts: they are “enlightened” princesses dictating higher principles from high above, and everyone is their lackey, bouncer or menial.

The “classic” feudal style nobility is military aristocracy, that is professional decision-makers regulated directly by natural selection (red-in-tooth-and-claw one, not in any metaphorical sense). As they lose this, they become a cancer.

Capitalism and socialism are both Marx’s bastard children. Yes, we can call the economic structure of the 1660-1820 period capitalism, but it bears little resemblance to how capitalism behaves. Capitalism is another leftist holiness spiral, this time on the part of the libertarians. The obsession with uncontrolled markets and the ridiculous ideas that come from them, like free trade and open borders, are leftist positions.

Go back to 1660 by all means, but we also need to crush the libertarian idea of it. Capitalism must be under authority, but a single authority. Someone must own the market, and control it. As Jim says, one payoff, not thousands of conflicting payoffs.

Tl:dr, a loan needs to be of something real and the return of something is the payment to be a non-usurious loan. Example: you lend a farmer some seed and fertiliser, and agree a share of the crop. But if the crop fails, you have no recourse to foreclose on the farm, or to sue the farmer personally.

Lending to corporations or sovereigns with interest is OK, as they are not individuals.

So, a profit is OK, as long as you don’t have full-recourse to chase the borrower for repayment in money. Repayment has to be of the actual physical thing. It’s more like equity investing than lending. Also charitable lending is fine, no interest of course.

Money has always been debt by the way (read the first half of David Graeber’s book on the subject).

Oh come on. Corporations, shareholders, shares, boards, CEOs, and the pursuit of profit. Capital, entrepreneurs, and wage labor. That is capitalism as we know it, minus the vast regulatory state, and the University as gatekeeper.

Corporations existed before 1660, but the corporate pursuit of profit was deemed wicked and illegitimate. Corporations were socialism. What happened in 1660 was that Charles the Second did a Deng, making it respectable, indeed high status, to use the corporate form to get rich, and that is the capitalism that brought us world conquest and the industrial revolution.

Carlylean is correct. The use of capitalism to profit is not wrong. The behavior of the capitalists is what needs to be controlled. The status can be a problem. It does no good to get advanced technology if it costs us our civilization to the capitalists, any more than if we lose it to socialists.

Sperging about the right to rule as if we’re playing a symmetric game is what got us into this mess. There are men with better backgrounds and talents who should rule. That’s a pleb attitude and I’m a pleb.\

The people who can rule should probably choose amongst themselves by a better procedure than taking money from pedophile kikes and then using that money to lie to the plebs saying they’ll fix healthcare by stealing all the money and giving it to more grad students like they did with the union money.

>Charles the Second did a Deng, making it respectable, indeed high status, to use the corporate form to get rich, and that is the capitalism that brought us world conquest and the industrial revolution.

And globalism, and the never-ending merger of state/corporations, and the military-industrial machine, and nukes, and countless other nasty things I could list.

I will research what Charles II did and why, I bet I find the usual suspects pulling his strings.

As for world conquest: for whom? Not for Charles II or any King, just for the money-men.

> > Charles the Second did a Deng, making it respectable, indeed high status, to use the corporate form to get rich, and that is the capitalism that brought us world conquest and the industrial revolution.

> And globalism, and the never-ending merger of state/corporations, and the military-industrial machine

The American empire is the anti American empire, and after 1840 the British empire started to turn into the anti British empire.

There’s a whole lot of wonderful land out there inhabited by people who can barely tell one end of a rifle from the other. One white soldier is worth hundreds to thousands of black soldiers, at least under black leadership, and quite a few Indian or Arab soldiers. I am not so sure about Han. Japanese and white Jews are more or less our equals in battle.

There will always be a Cecil Rhodes or a Lord Clive ready to reap gold and glory by going out there, crushing the natives, taxing them and selling the best land to Europeans. “Empire”, in its healthy, capitalist, colonial mode, is simply a natural result of whites living on the same planet as weaker races. Colonialism is like the market, patriarchy and private property; it is something you have to suppress, not a policy you have a choice whether to pursue or not. If you are going to stop world-colonialism, you are going to have to suppress it worldwide, by means of an anti-colonial empire, such has existed since the whigs abolished slavery.

The choice is not between empire or not-empire, it is between spontaneous white expansion, and suppression of white expansion (by whites).

>On domestic politics within the United Kingdom, Rhodes was a supporter of the Liberal Party

>Rhodes wanted to make the British Empire a superpower in which all of the British-dominated countries in the empire, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Cape Colony, would be represented in the British Parliament

They’re all the same, democracy-loving, liberal globalists and often fags too. You get excited by him because he’s a white supremacist? You can keep these fags, they are no friend of British men. And you can keep those foreign lands too.

Baloney. Capitalism is natural, like water running downhill. As long as you have different people who make different kinds of stuff, and want to trade that stuff with each other, you will have capitalism.

Capitalism flows from private property, which is simply accepting reality. However, only Anglo-Saxons do this naturally. To a lesser extent Hajnal Europeans will do this. Everyone else immediately jumps to forms of collective ownership, which in practice means you can’t sell your farm to raise capital for a weaving mill, so they remain poor until conquered by Anglo-Saxons.

Even though the Chicoms have every opportunity to understand capitalism, and are indeed approximating it pretty well, they still don’t quite get it. Private property is still unnatural for them.

The worst of the social justice / feminism / intersectionality / critical theory / victim Olympics BS is on the ropes. The main stream media is begging to shift. And movies too. For instance see “Triggered movie 2018” in YouTube.

The thing to be vigilant on is the embedded toxic ideology, which is the real danger. As the public becomes more aware they will lie, project double down and rename to hide there toxic religion.

I really like the time element being there, and the nations being kept constant, with the economic system as an observation rather than part of the model per se.

It’s just a shame the set wasn’t complete with Berlin 1968 to Berlin 2018 under a changing system.

There’s a nice clip on YT of some random guy walking round Berlin in 1988 and the guide’s basically explaining how much better it is since Perestroika/Glasnost, with more street musicians and vendors.
I wonder if that same dude would be enthusing about the racket, the graffiti, the human waste and the ever-present threat of violent crime in contemporary Berlin.

But a leftist will tell you that Venezuelan socialism has cured inflation, and officially it has.

Officially everything is wonderful in Venezuela, and if any bad things happen in actual practice, it is because evil capitalists have not been sufficiently crushed yet. Utopia is the law, and if the actual experience is far from utopian, evil lawbreakers must be punished.

I would make it more capitalists in most respects but I would make it more if not socialists then authoritarian in three.

1) I would BAN health insurance (and if there is ANY industries that should be socialized it is insurance and banking since real competition in them NEVER exists and they are always a racket that vacuum wealth away from everyone else in a parasitic way).

2) I would require health care menu pricing so people could comparison shop.

3) I would either have all the malpractice attorneys shot, or would drastically limit suits. I’m not sure which.

Competition between doctors requires an open market with pricing requires better malpractice standards than a legal requirement to have QuANGO certification.

QuANGO certification because nothing bad ever happens to anyone was the old standard, and infinity money for anything bad happening. Recently there was a law stipulating dollar amounts for damage to particular bodyparts. Get rid of the QuANGO certification and instead have malpractice insurance companies that pretend that voodoo doctors are profitable to insure and courts that refuse to accept malpractice claims from yt against african doctors because it’s racist to think they’re not doing a good job.

It’s funny: As Dilbert once asked, Does it actually even count as a lie if they know that no one will believe it? I mean, it’s not as if the average Venezuelan can’t see it for themselves.

It occurs to me that if the official stats are saying “Inflation is zero,” then that may be more in the nature of “Point deer, make horse” than an actual attempt to fool anyone. I.e., “Here’s a blatantly obvious falsehood, which you don’t dare contradict, citizen.”

But what is “lefter”? Leftism has no essence, it is just a coalition to knock over the apple cart in order to grab some of the apples, so “lefter” is whatever direction looks like some apples could be knocked loose. “Lefter” could be almost anything

Leftism is Sophism. Sophists are shamans of the alien human. Using signs and portents they manipulate the animal to make it do something useful to the shaman.

If it was really just about taking apples from the apple cart, it’s far more direct and efficient to do it the warrior way – simply walk up to the apple cart while well armed, and refuse to pay. Indeed this is less disruptive than the Sophist way. Leftists, however, are cowards and avoid any kind of direct confrontation. And if you think they couldn’t meme it into existence if they wanted to, I will remind you about pride parades and gay marriage.

Game theory tightly restricts how Sophism incarnates. E.g. the responsible people have stuff to take, but aren’t very gullible, while the irresponsible have lots of gullibility but not much in the way of stuff. Ergo, democracy, such that the numerous gullible can have power over the responsible – and the Sophist takes their cut.

Warrior parasitism also has the advantage that if someone tries to horn in on the gig, the warriors will beat up the interlopers. Sophists must negotiate. While occasionally they can gin up a mob to destroy the interlopers, usually it’s limited to marginalization at best.

Limited capitalism has provided so much stuff that high Sophists are sated. Instead it’s now wholly about status. The point of immigration is to replace somewhat low status whites with even more servile and incompetent nonwhites, to widen the status differential. Immigration largely stops at the gates of the metonymic gated community. At least, that’s the idea. If the immigrants get uppity about those gates, if they try to South Africa the homeland, the army will be ordered to shoot them. It depends on what the army does at that point – historically they’ve pined and lamented, but obeyed. However, the low Sophists will likely be devoured, because they contaminate the nice clean caste divide between high Sophist and NAM.

To have socialism, must have
* stuff that can be stolen
* people nominally in charge of stuff who don’t really feel putting in the work of stewardship and who really just want to signal their superior virtue
* socialists who can turn the stuff they steal into virtue signals
* some class of people or thing that can be fetishized

Once socialism starts, in addition there are left-masses who like receiving stolen stuff in exchange for supporting socialism because someone else will anyway, and right-masses who don’t want to receive stolen stuff but maybe want to take money from socialists in other ways or bang whores.

When the masses are sufficiently demoralized by socialism, they will cry out for a leader, who will put and end to the theft and the whoring and bring back decency and normalcy.

Oh, and in America we had kidfucker socialism fueled by blackmail and the fact that ordinary people get very angry about being forced to think about desert rats coming to this country to take over the entire entertainment and news industry to both control us and put weird stuff in all the moves and TV.

And now everyone knows that socialists and BLM and ANTIFA and whoever are just running cover for pedos. This kills the socialism.

Obvious explanation is that socialists lack the strength or power to take stuff via warrior method, so they utilize cooperative methods to overwhelm the stronger individualists. This lines up nicely with the general observation that socialism is a coalition of outcasts and losers teaming up to overthrow society.

Basically it’s the Sneaky Fucker strategy. Not ideal, but it’s the only way they can propagate their genes.

Sophists have to be savagely intelligent, or they will get fooled by someone who is.
The bioleninists are tools. They are the gullible mass which, via the alchemy of democracy, is converted into power.

However, due to the wide divide in intelligence between the high Sophists and the power mass, commands filter down slowly. This has the benefit of laundering responsibility: after maybe two layers the actual commander is forgotten and only the command remains. A further benefit is that the high Sophist can tightly limit exposure to their own lies and thus largely avoid getting high on their own supply.

The downside is there is no way to control quickly or with precision. The lower Sophists often behave independently simply because they have to: not enough information comes from the high Sophists to fully determine their actions.

High Sophists would dearly love to cut SJWs off, simply truncating the hiearchy, creating a peasant/aristocrat divide. They cannot do this. For one, democracy vs. aristocrat. For another, they would have to take responsibility for the action, and thus would have to deal with the backlash. The first Sophist to stick their neck out like that will 100% get it chopped through, and allow their fellow Sophists to take advantage of their hard work. Prisoner’s dilemma.

>Sophists have to be savagely intelligent, or they will get fooled by someone who is.

Don’t necessarily need to be intelligent; indeed, often less intelligent (in terms of world formation capacity) relative to peers who may have arrived at their shared stations through more godly means. What is necessary is the right instincts; sensitivity to forms that will resonate, and motivation to perpetrate.

This lines up nicely with the general observation that socialism is a coalition of outcasts and losers teaming up to overthrow society.

Too many of them are too well off to be “outcasts and losers”.
They are not desperate paupers and menials seeking to overthrow their lord, they are jumped-up lackeys seeking to overthrow their lord, who invite paupers and menials to look more formidable, but have no intention to give the expendables they despise a fair share.

Its the human extinction movement.
The only threat to the movement is extinction of itself.
Extinction of it at the hands of Men of The Christian West.
An existential war between the leftist and their bedfellows, and Men of The West is close at hand.
I think it all could only happen this way.
Something which has been festering since the 1st Revolutionary War. The war of northern aggression was a second war of seceding from this festering puss pocket of the human extinction movement.
I think now its the western hemisphere as the apple cart. Almost all the component apple carts of the Christian West are kicked over, except the genocide apple cart of White Christian Grecco/Roman culture. This is all that’s stands in its way, always having been to ultimate end game.

The neat thing about the last apple cart is it carries indomitable apples, apples which when their apple tolerance is reached its end, become really excellent apples who will not stop till the human extinction movement becomes extinct.
Apples with no mercy, ferocious warrior apples swhi will not stop till they decide to stop.
Its always been since The 5000 Year Leap the good apples have known in their bones there is no room for the bad apples. It is because the 5000 year riegn of the bad apples The 5000 Year Leap of the good apples was created

In a thread on my blog, a supposed reactionary has been telling me how socialist agriculture worked great in Russia long ago and far away, and they had to do it because the climate being harsh, they had to have collective agriculture because it works so much better.

* Huh. Is noticing that humans are not adapted to digesting sawdust (without much conclusions beyond “therefore gorging on sawdust should be considered a bad idea for any human until and unless conclusively proven otherwise”) enough to count as reactionary? I’m not objecting, it just looks like a threshold set disconcertingly low.
* Not everything that requires participation of more than one dude without one of them owning or hiring others is automatically “socialism”.
* Also, things are not always done some way “because it works so much better” (in which way “better”?).
It’s just like with group hunt. If the whole tribe hunts mammoth/boars/whatever together, it’s not because they were ordered to use this as the ideologically correct way by a commissar, or because it allows to save much effort. They do it because it’s the only way good enough to take given types of strong or fast prey, in the given terrain, with spears, at all. If smaller groups worked about as well, they’d probably go on several hunts and thus covered larger area.
* In either case, the first-hand witnesses participating or seriously studying the matter are to be heeded first and foremost. Not necessarily their conclusions, but they know what they see.
I therefore don’t always agree with Parshev, but he digs out some good testimonies.
But things like hands>lands are everywhere. E.g. in Dead Souls the whole fraud hinges on a simple fact: tiers of landowners at the time were defined only by amount of serfs owned, while the possibly empty land as such does not matter.

“Americans Live In A World Of Lies” makes the case that the Mueller probe is a coup attempt, which isn’t controversial to any of us;
“South Africa Is On The Road To Barbarism and So Is the Rest of the West” is an astonishing piece on the JQ! He exempts himself from persecution by saying that his own theory is it’s all the fault of (whistle) capitalists (he also regularly rails against (whistle) central bankers)…. but he concludes that Kevin MacDonald’s bang on the money and that it’s bad, bad news.

This is why people we scorned when we were libertarians can now be our friends. The left’s abandoning formerly left-wing positions on money etc. (as well as WAR of course) and they’re ripe for picking up in the name of populism.
We shouldn’t go so far as to talk about inequality as a great societal evil, because it’s not, but the idea of a wealthy society providing basic security to all isn’t so unreasonable, and neither’s the idea of stopping the well-connected and powerful from screwing us over.